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CHRISTIANITY
& PSYCHOLOGY

LECTURES TOWARDS AN INTRODUCTION,

BY

F. R. BAER& J&A., D.S.O.

PRINCIPAL OF KNUTSFORD
SCHOLAR AND SOMETIME FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD

LONDON
STUDENT CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT

32 RUSSELL SQUARE, W.C. I
1923

First published April 1923.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
THE EDINBURGH TRESS, 9 AND II YOUNG STREET, EDINBURGH

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

PREFACE ...... v

INTRODUCTION . . . . , I

I. INSTINCT . . . . 9

II. THE UNCONSCIOUS ..... 23

III. SUGGESTION AND WILL .... 41

IV. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE RELIGIOUS LIFE . 65

1. Facing our Discords . . . 71

2. Losing Ourselves .... 74

3. Jesus and Human Personality . . 78

4. Guilt and Forgiveness ... 82

5. Christianity and Instinct ... 87
V. SUGGESTION AND PRAYER .... 99

VI. THE DANGER OF SUBJECTIVITY IN RELIGION . 117

VII. CHRISTIAN POWER AND RESOURCES . .138

VIII. PSYCHOLOGY AND THEOLOGY . . . 158

IX. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH . 174

BIBLIOGRAPHY ..... 193

INDEX ....... 195

.
111

PREFACE

I HAVE had the greater part of this little book lying
in a drawer for a couple of years. It did not seem
to me worth publishing, and I was waiting for an
opportunity to work it up into a more satisfactory
form. It has, however, become very obvious that
this opportunity will never come. Meanwhile I
have had continual requests to try to put out some-
thing of this kind, and there is apparently a good
deal of demand for it. So with considerable hesita-
tion I have done just such revision as was possible,
making such changes as were made necessary by
further reading during the last two years, and con-
sented to its publication.

It is meant to be very elementary and to serve the
needs partly of the clergy and students for the
Ministry, partly of the increasing number of people
without any very great technical knowledge who are
interested or disturbed by the religious bearings of
Psychology. For those to whom the subject is
quite new I have written (or rather compiled) the
first three chapters ; but readers who know the main
drift of the New Psychology can probably take them

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

as read. My own chief interest is in the later part
of the book. There are plenty of people now who
can interpret the religious life in psychological
terms. What seems to be chiefly lacking is a readi-
ness to face the much more thorny problem the
philosophical and theological implications of the
new psychological theories. Psychology is certainly
an ally, but a dangerous ally, to the Christian thinker,
and it seems to me that unless we are careful we shall
soon find a smile on the face of the tiger and the
Christian theology " inside." The philosophical
position which a good deal of modern writing takes
for granted appears to me to be frankly incompatible
with the Christian view of the world. I have there-
fore tried to suggest some lines of approach for a
fuller consideration of this matter. The greater
part of this book was written before the appearance
of Mr Pym's well-known book. But in a sense what
follows might be regarded as a sort of continuation
of his, taking the argument about one step further.
Most of the following chapters started as lectures,
some to clergy and some to undergraduates. As
speech comes more naturally to me than writing I
have not thought it necessary to disguise their
original form too carefully. Chapter VII. was
originally an address to the S.GM. in the Guildhall

vi

PREFACE

at Cambridge. The substance of Chapters VIIL
and IX. was first published in The Pilgrim, and I
am indebted to the Editor for allowing them to be
reprinted.

I have given references for my statements so that
the student can find his way about if he wishes to
pursue the matter further. I have also acknowledged
those debts of which I am conscious : but there are
bound to be many more. I wish also to express my
thanks to my friend Dr L. F. Browne, M.D., of the
Tavistock Clinic, who has read through all the MS.
and saved me from several technical " howlers."
Mr J. G. Hillam of New College gave me most
valuable secretarial help.

I cannot claim any expert knowledge and I am not
writing a book for experts. I can only say that the
practical part of this book has been verified in
experience in the work on which I have lately been
engaged. For the rest, I have merely done the best
I could in the limitations of time and circumstances.
How inadequate it is nobody knows more clearly
than myself. I can but hope that my attempt may
stimulate others better qualified to do it better.

F. R. B.

KNUTSFORD,

March 1923.

. .
vn

Christianity and Psychology

INTRODUCTION.

EVERY age seems to be dominated by some special
branch of science, into terms of which it translates
most of its thought. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries we had the mathematical
sciences with the Age of Reason as their resultant
and a Religion of Enlightened Persons. The nine-
teenth was ruled by Biology, and spell-bound by the
" blessed word " Evolution. But Psychology is
sovereign in the twentieth. The practical needs of
the war-situation the exigencies of leadership and
government, as well as the urgent problems of
therapeutics created by what was commonly called
" shell-shock " focused attention on a neglected
study, and provided on a scale unknown before the
raw material for its exercise. It was with this as
with most of our other problems : the war did not
create, but it underlined them. And the terrific
strain to which all were subjected, and from which
we have none of us yet fully recovered, forced the
mind back, as it were, upon itself, and created an
unprecedented interest in the specifically mental
sciences, as well as in spiritism and similar cults. We
are all psychologists to-day. Psychology has become
" popular " more rapidly than any science previously,
and a positive spate of books pours forth from the
publishers on psycho-analysis and the New Psy-

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

chology. The general public as well as professional
thinkers are coming more and more under its spell.
History and the social sciences, industrial organization,
generalship, over and above the technique of medi-
cine, are being re-thought in psychological terms.
And the tide is advancing up the religious beaches.
Theology cannot always play Canute. So that it
seems imperatively necessary for all who are teachers
or students of religion to begin at least to define our
attitude to the conclusions of this new branch of
knowledge or we shall get our feet wet very badly.

The past is full of warning to us here. The
notorious refusal of theology to countenance or try
to come to terms with the Darwinian hypothesis
vitiated the thought of half a century. The unreal
separation between theology and natural science
proved disastrous for both of them. Refusal to re-
state always brings its nemesis. And when th&tr
evolution-theory percolated through to the man in
the street it was supposed in a dim, unthinking way
to have made Christianity incredible. For obscur-
antism is always suicidal. But a similar process is at
work to-day. Already there is a tendency to think
and some psychologists assume it without argu-
ment that the discoveries of the New Psychology
have knocked the bottom out of the theologian's ark.

It would seem to be highly necessary, therefore,
that we should keep abreast of this new science. We
must avoid, no doubt, the exuberant claims which its
devotees are apt to make for it. In some lectures
that follow we shall criticize them. On the other
hand, we must clear our minds at once of the sug-
gestion that this new branch of learning is in any way

2

INTRODUCTION

opposed to the Christian faith. My chief idea in
these lectures is certainly not that psychology should
be studied in order that we should be on our guard
against it which seems an inadequate motive for
Seeking knowledge. It is rather that we cannot fail
to find in it an ally of supreme importance both in
study and in life. Indeed, so far is it from being true
that the New Psychology is anti-religious though
some of its professors, no doubt, may be so that the
more one reads, the more the conviction grows that
here we have simply in scientific form, reduced to
technical term and law and formula, part of the
secret of the way in which Our Lord during His
ministry dealt with the lives of men and women.
Nothing in our new knowledge goes beyond His
incomparable intuitions. More and more, as one
reads the well-known books, the old phrases of the
New Testament come into the mind again with a
new and, I think, very widely enriched meaning.
It would be a tragedy if Christianity and its best
handmaid among the sciences should come to regard
one another as natural enemies. And I am convinced
that nothing but added strength and depth and range
in our religious lives, and even still more in ministerial
work, can come from a careful study of psychology.
Several of our best psychologists take their re-
searches to the point where conduct loses itself in
Religion. But few, if any, so far as my knowledge
goes, have yet attempted a co-ordination between
psychology and the teaching of Jesus, or between
psychological practice and Christian faith. 1 Dr

1 This was written a good many months before the publication of
Mr Pym's Psychology and the Christian Life (S.C.M.).

3

CHRISTIANITY 'AND PSYCHOLOGY

Hadfield felt himself bound, to our great loss, to
confine himself to the findings of psychology in his
masterly essay in The Spirit* It is much to be
hoped that he will soon take us further. Meantime,
while we are still waiting for expert guidance, it
seems worth while even for the layman to blunder
in where the expert would fear to tread, and attempt
to cut out the beginnings of a path.

The attempt seems to be worth making, even if
demonstrably unsuccessful, in so far as it may lead
other people to learn some lessons from our mistakes,
and tackle the matter more satisfactorily.

Nobody who is not a specialist could try his hand
with so specialized a subject without being conscious
of terrible presumption. My excuse must be that
my aim is merely to introduce the reader to the
experts, who can correct for him any points in which
what I shall say may prove misleading. I have also a
feeling, for which I do not apologize, that the ordin-
ary working parson, living intellectually from hand
to mouth, and precluded from anything that can be
called research, may conceivably perform some useful
function in attempting to render the findings of the
specialists (for whose work we can never be grateful
enough) into terms of ordinary working religion. It
has seemed to me that some of the best thinking has
been done by men immersed in practical work, and
therefore, perhaps, more eagerly alive to the need for
positive and constructive thought.

I was therefore glad to receive an invitation which

i "The Psychology of Power" in The Spirit, edited by Streeter
(Macmillan). Dr Crichton Miller has now promised us a volume on
The New Psychology and the Preacher.

4

INTRODUCTION

forced me to try and arrange in coherent form some
vague ideas that were shaping in my own mind.
My hope is that I may help to persuade others to
take up and follow out for themselves an extra-
ordinarily important line of thought,

It is often objected that a superficial knowledge of
modern psychology must be " dangerous." It prob-
ably is. But that is equally true of superficial
knowledge of anything else. And the cure for it,
surely, is not blank ignorance, but an attempt
to gain rather deeper knowledge. All I shall try
to do in these lectures is to supply some sort of
introduction which may lead on to independent
study. But let us be clear, from the start, what
our purpose is.

I find myself inf profound disagreement with a
widespread modern ^tendency, of which M. Bergson
is the leading exponent, to appeal back from Reason
or Intelligence to what we must hold to be infra-
rational faculties. It is a popular doctrine at the
moment that, in the evolution of Intelligence, some
power of the highest value has been lost, which it is
the task of the moderns to recover. Primitive man
was possessed, so the argument runs, of certain far
more delicate intuitions, certain powers of com-
munion with the unconscious, which the struggle for
existence has driven under. Intelligence is but an
external faculty, devised for meeting the demands
of living : but the true inner life of man is impervious
to it. So that the way of mental and moral progress
is to turn our backs on this misleading tendency, and
trust ourselves to the guidance of blind will an idea
to which I can attach no meaning or plunge our-

5

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

\

selves again in the unconscious. Then we shall once
again be masters in our own essential inner lives.

There is, no doubt, some fascination in this sugges-
tion when we first encounter it. But it seems quite
definitely reactionary. As I read it, the whole
history of the development of the higher life, the
whole extension of man's mastery over himself as
well as his environment, the creation of all that is
best and most divine in the civilizations of the world,
has been due to the process which this theory criti-
cizes, namely, the increasing exploration of the dim
recesses of our minds by the light of conscious reason,
their increasing control by the acts of conscious will.
All creative art and all morality, all social and poli-
tical achievements, are surely the creation of man's
mind working from within outwards. It would
appear that Christianity, with its cardinal belief in
" losing the self to find it," and its worship of the
Creative Reason made manifest in palpable life, is on
the line of all real advance. The religions of mystery
and superstition, of wizards that " peep and mutter,"
of intense emotional experiences untranslated into
ethical act, definitely belong to the lower level from
which true progress must always lead us on. Greece,
as it seems to me, gave the lead, and the human race
can never turn its back on her. This is not to argue
for a so-called Rationalism a dismal and superficial
creed enough, which can only see one-tenth of the
facts before it. But it is to base ourselves and our
activities on the foundation of that by which man is
man self-conscious intelligence and directive Pur-
pose, The exhortation " Know Thyself," which is
now quoted so wearisomely often, is of value only in

6

INTRODUCTION

so far as the knowledge of ourselves when gained is
to be used to make our conscious lives more rich,
more harmonious and more effective. Self-revela-
tion rather than self-inspection is of the very nature
of personality.

Thus it is an entire misrepresentation to say that
in urging people to study psychology we are asking
them to paddle in the muddy stream of the uncon-
scious. Our object is the very opposite. If in the
course of our inquiries we have to go downstairs and
explore the cellar, that is not because we like the
cellar better or propose to use it instead of the
drawing-room. It is rather that knowing the con-
tents of our cellar, we can the better control it from
the study. This, at least, is the standpoint of these
lectures.

But, before we can decide what to do with the
facts, we must first discover what the facts are a
useful step too frequently omitted. That is to say,
before we can discuss the bearing of the Christian
religion on the modern psychological discoveries, we
must know, in outline, what those discoveries are.
We shall therefore have to devote our first three
lectures to an elementary explanation of the main
facts to which I invite attention. In these I shall
aim at nothing more ambitious than an attempt to
reproduce from the vast amount of literature avail-
able the salient and most important results. It is
hoped that any who are interested will then read the
books concerned themselves, not being content to
take it second-hand. Then, when we have made
clear, in barest outline, some of the chief theories of
psychology, we shall try to show how Christianity

7

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

comes in to meet the facts as thus presented to us.
We shall deal first with practical religion. After
that we shall try, greatly daring, to advance to more
speculative ground, and endeavour to suggest some
line of approach for the consideration of some
problems which must confront the student of Theo-
logy as soon as he starts to read psychological books.

Out of all the range of possible points for discus-
sion, we shall, in the main, confine ourselves to three,
namely, Instinct, the Unconscious, and that vast
world of new power and knowledge which is being
unlocked for us by Suggestion.

We will start, then, at once by some outline notes
on Instinct.

8

CHAPTER I.

INSTINCT.

IT is impossible to understand the theories of the New
Psychology unless we start with some study of the
Instincts. Their place is absolutely fundamental in
the whole structure of the science. For in fact the
starting-point of our whole inquiry must be the
whole-hearted recognition of the hypothesis of
" Evolution " in the sphere of mental and spiritual
life. Not our bodies only, but our minds as well are
continuous with those of our animal ancestors, and
we forget or deny that at our peril. The human
mind, with all its amazing capacities and its infinite
possibilities is, nevertheless, regarded from one
standpoint, a product of organic evolution. This
was recognized by Darwin as much as fifty years
ago. But it is only comparatively lately that psy-
chologists have come to realize what this means for
their own branch of study. Indeed, the " newness "
of the new psychology mainly turns upon this very
point. The old psychology was mainly occupied
with the analysis of thought and knowledge. It
was predominantly " intellectualist," occupied with
the study of rational thought, i.e. with our conscious
mental processes, working almost entirely by intro-
spection. The " new " psychology starts from a
frank acceptance of the evolutionary theory. And

9

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

this carries with it the corollary that the rational
thought which formed the subject-matter of the
inquiries of the older writers is itself the climax of a
long development. From the simplest form of
reflex-action in the most primitive types of organ-
ism, up to the god-like reason of a Socrates, is one
unbroken process occupying millions of years. Thus
man's self-conscious reason rests on a biological
foundation. It is built over animal appetites, and
surrounded with non-rational processes. It carries
with it traces of its ancestry. Our mental lives, just
like our bodily organs, have only come to be what
they are by a long course of development, and in
them we can read their history. It is, therefore,
only to be expected that some of the peculiarities in
the mental activities of men will be found to have
their explanation in the animal basis upon which
they rest, and the rational (partly at least) in the
less-than-rational. How far this line of interpreta-
tion leads us we shall see as our argument proceeds.
For, if you once admit biology into psychology
at all, you cannot cut your subject into two halves.
You cannot draw a line and say, On this side we have
reason and self-consciousness and on the other side
infra-rational tendencies. The two interpenetrate.
On the one hand, every element in man's life is dis-
tinctively and specifically human : it is saturated by
his specific character as a self-conscious being, with
will and reason. But equally it must be recognized
that the instinctive and non-rational factors deeply
colour and affect the rational.

Thus, what has come to be called the New
Psychology is concerned with a far wider range of

10

INSTINCT

elements and infinitely more complex processes in
our mental life than was its parent science. It
includes in its Investigations the ancestral springs of
self-conscious personality, and is ready to find ex-
planations of what might seem distinctively human
facts in tendencies that come down from an earlier
time. Of these, Instinct is the most important.

It is the first and most essential postulate for the
scientific study of the mind that all our mental pro-
cesses rest upon, and are inextricably bound up with,
the great inherited biological instincts by which life
is preserved and reproduced. They lie at the root
of our whole psychic life ; all its energy derives from
them, and upon them and out of them are built up all
the manifold elaborations of the complex structure
which is the mind of Man. They "determine the
ends of all activities, and supply the driving-power
by which all mental activities are sustained." The
psychic life of the saint or the pure thinker no less than
that of the purely " animal " man, is deeply rooted in
those ancestral instincts which brought life through
its seons of development to the gate of human con-
sciousness. Our minds can no more disown these
poor relations than our bodies can " cut " the liver
or the lungs. And just as, often, a weakness in brain
or eye may be due to a failure in some less noble
organ, so diseases and " abnormalities " which make
themselves felt in the sphere of conscious reason may
be traced as often as not to their roots in instinct.
It is this discovery or recognition which has revolu-
tionized " mental treatment " and founded the
triumphs of modern psycho-therapy. The psycho-
logy with which we are here concerned moves from

II

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

first to last within the circle of which this postulate
is the diameter.

This, then, is the starting-point of our whole
discussion, and it may require some mental readjust-
ment before we are quite ready to accept it. We
shall have to be prepared, if necessary, to revise our
attitude towards our instincts. We tend to think
and speak extremely vaguely about instinct in the
animals, as though it were, by contrast with reason,
some inexplicable faculty implanted in their breasts
by the Creator, but in no way shared by Man.
" Animals have instinct, Man has reason " is the
popular way of stating it. Or, if we recognize the
presence of instinct in civilized human life at all, we
tend to regard it as something impolite, something
which is the enemy of " spirit/' not to be recognized
in religious circles. We refer with a blush of shame
to " our animal instincts " (by which, in fact, we
commonly mean sex) and assume that we must out-
grow them and live them down. But the whole
burden of modern psychology is that this is utterly
-impossible, even if it were admitted to be desirable.
There is no activity of human life which does not get
Its driving-power from instinct, and no thought,
emotion or desire, however pure and however highly
spiritualized, which has not instinct at the root of it.
This is the first fact with which we must come to terms.
It is also true, as we shall see later, that with the
development of intelligence, instincts may be dis-
guised and modified, fused and combined with one
another, till they acquire almost a different signifi-
cance from that which they had for the earlier forms
of life. For intelligence can conceive ideal aims, and

12

INSTINCT

so set in motion the instinctive impulses in directions
which are not really native to them. The pugna-
cious instinct fused with that of the herd may make a
man an excellent Bridge partner. Thus it appears
that there is a tendency amongst certain of the best-
known psychologists, especially those who write
about sociology, to exaggerate the purely biological
interpretation of the most commonplace human
thoughts and acts. This is no doubt an inevitable
tendency in great pioneer researches. But, while
this tendency may be borne in mind, we have still to
recognize definitely and surely that however much
refined or jnodified, to whatever extent weakened in
significance, instincts are operative all along the line.
But, if we are to start from this assumption, we
must try to reach some more exact conception of
the view which modern psychology takes of instinct.
It is not a mysterious substitute for knowledge, as we
tend to suggest when we say of our fox-terrier that
he knows or does such and such a thing " by instinct, 5 '
whereas his master would have to think about it.
Still less is it possible to understand it as a highly
elaborate form of intelligence, achieving by some sort
of intuition a long and complicated course of reason-
ing. On the other hand, a purely mechanical view,
as though instinct was always really " blind," and
instinctive actions those of conscious automata,
fails to do full justice to the facts. In particular, it
seems to make impossible the subsequent develop-
ment of intelligence, which is " born within the
sphere of instinct," l and comes increasingly to
impregnate and guide it.

1 Hobhouse, Mind in Evolution (1901), p. 77.

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

Instinct is probably best understood as an exten-
sion or development of what is commonly called
" reflex-action," containing from the first a
" mental " element, which yet falls short of what we
can call intelligence. From the first, we can dis-
tinguish in it the three characteristic elements of all
developed mental processes knowing, feeling and
acting. When a man's " instinct of self-preserva-
tion " impels him to run away from danger, we can
clearly analyse these three elements. He perceives
the dangerous object : he experiences the feelings or
emotions which are stirred in him by the presence of
danger : and the two result in the activity (or, as it
is technically called, " conation ") which sends him
running down the road. Thus, whereas reflex-
action appears to be a purely physical process a
certain stimulus to the retina causing at once the
closing of the eyelid instinct appears to have in it
from the first some element of thought, feeling and
purpose. 1 So that while instinct is properly re-
garded as the response of inherited structure when
the appropriate stimulus presents itself that is
what many psychologists call " behaviour " there is
something more, which cannot be fully explained in
terms of the discharge of nervous reflexes.

On the one hand, instinctive action is not unerring.
There is, for example, a type of beetle of which the
larva attaches itself to a bee which has afterwards to
provide for it. But the larva does not know the bee.
" They seem to attach themselves to any hairy
object that may come near them. . . . They attach

1 Of course, "purpose" need not necessarily be conscious purpose as
we understand it.

U

INSTINCT

themselves with equal readiness to any other hairy
insect, and it is probable that very large numbers
perish in consequence of attaching themselves to the
wrong insects." l Thus, instinct is seen to be not
infallible ; that is, it admits of development and
perfection, and so is capable of modification.
Lambs, for example, will often try to suck a tuft
of wool on the ewe's neck, or anything except the
proper object, until at length they find the udder,
to which they are attracted by smelL This shows
that there is not merely a reflex-action by which
the presence of a given stimulus inevitably produces
the result. There is the possibility of error, and
therefore of trial and " education " at least in a
rudimentary form. Yet it is simply a perceived
stimulus, the contact with the hairs, for example,
which sets the train of instinctive action working.

On the other hand, many instinctive actions com-
prise an elaborate sequence of related " reactions.' 5
If we take, for example, the hen's care for her
chickens, each particular act in the whole perform-
ance her call, her lifting of her wings, etc. might
conceivably be called a reflex. It might be a purely
reflex-action that she clucks when a certain stimulus
reaches her eye, or lifts her wings when she sees the
chickens coming. But how are we to account for the
combination (or " integration ") of all these reactions
into one complex and consistent piece of behaviour ?
Or why is it that a hen gets " broody " and goes
through all the performance of hatching eggs, even

-X.

1 Quoted in Hobhouse, op. cit., p. 49. The reader is advised to work
through Chap. IV, of this book, with its fascinating examples of animal
behaviour,

15

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

though she has no eggs to sit on ? " There seems
to be at least some permanent state corresponding
to what we call . . . the parental instinct which
dominates the hen's actions throughout, and without
which the various reflexes would not be discharged
by their appropriate stimuli/' *

These very elementary examples will help us to
understand without perplexity the definition with
which we shall work here. Dr McDougalPs Introduc-
tion to Social Psychology is the pioneer work for all
this branch of the subject, and the first book that
should be read by anybody wishing to start the study
of modern psychology. His definition of instinct is
as follows :

" We may define instinct as an inherited
or innate psycho-physical disposition which
determines its possessor to perceive and pay
attention to objects of a certain class, to
experience an emotional excitement of a
certain quality upon perceiving such an
object, and to act in regard to it in a parti-
cular manner, or at least to experience an
impulse to such action." *

A more exact discussion of the matter will be
found in the books from which I have quoted.
What has been said is enough for our present
purposes. It will be noticed, then, that the distinc-
tive factors in this immense, determining force
called instinct are attention, an emotional experience,
and an impulse to a specific train of action.

* Hobhouse, op. cit., p. 53.

* P, 29 (I quote from the Fourteenth Edition throughout).

16

Dr McDougall has drawn up a list of twelve
primary " simple instincts " which underlie the
whole field of our psychic life. How far his analysis
may rightly be regarded as exhaustive (a matter on
which the experts are not agreed) I am not qualified
to discuss. Nor does it greatly matter for our
purposes, and not all of them will concern us equally.
From his list we may select the following :

Self-assertion. Sex.

Curiosity. Gregariousness.

Pugnacity. Parental Instinct,

Flight. Feeding.

To these we should probably add Sleep. 1 It will be
seen that these are chiefly concerned with the pre-
servation of life, its reproduction, and social environ-
ment, or (as they say) the herd.

These instincts remain constant throughout
history. It is impossible to eradicate them. Each
of them is charged with a specific emotional quality
or " affect," which supplies it with its driving-force.
All the energy we have is connected with these
inherited instincts, and is discharged in response to
the proper stimulus. All our life-force flows along
these channels. All this energy must find its outlet,
and there is no other energy available.

With the development of civilization, the imme-
diate need and opportunity for the operation of these
instincts is diminished. In the animal, they function
automatically. In response to the hunger-stimulus
it feeds : in response to the love-stimulus, it mates.
All the energy of the organism is used up naturally

1 W. Brown, Suggestion and Mental Analysis, p. 33.

I/ B

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

in these responses. When Man appears he brings a
problem with him.

Not all his instincts can find their normal outlet.
The sheer necessities of hunger, fear, etc., are miti-
gated by the conveniences of ordered life. And the
pressure of society and of whatever moral code he
recognizes tends to suppress the activity of those
instincts which have an anti-social tendency the
egotistic and pugnacious impulses. The social in-
stinct, indeed (as Trotter shows), colours the whole
of the psychic life of man : but one of its most
obvious results is to come into violent collision with
sex, self-seeking and pugnacity. Psychologists writ-
ing for the general public seem to me to lay excessive
emphasis on the problem of the sexual instinct,
often leaving the reader with the impression that
psychology is wholly concerned with sex, and that
human life should be studied in terms of it. This is
absurd : the sexual instinct is not more fundamental
than any other. Yet it is the instinct which is most
curtailed by the operation of social morality, and
thus inevitably figures large in the discords and
crises of individual lives.

These instincts tend to conflict with one another,
complete satisfaction of any one in the normal and
direct fashion being often incompatible with the
urgent demands of any or all of the others. Thus
some seem denied any real expression at all, or
any that is strong enough to satisfy them and draw
off their tremendous emotional " high-potential."
Hep.ce arise the infinite possibilities of the perversion
or abuse of instinct in what are called the vices
of civilization. It will be seen, then, that we are

18

INSTINCT

here approaching the ground-plan of what should be
developed into a psychology of sin. Instinct in
itself is, of course, not sinful. It is ridiculous to
speak of instincts as though they were what religion
calls " temptations." If hunger and love are sinful
impulses, then self-destruction must be the will of
God, and God be conceived as the Grand Nihilist.
But they do supply the raw material out of which
temptations are fashioned, and sin consists very
largely in their abuse. 1 An animal cannot " lust " :
a man can. Because a man, by his special mental
powers, is able to conceive ideal aims, to set before
himself consciously as the end of action some course
of satisfaction for its own sake. It is the doubtful
privilege of reason to be able to misuse its non-
rational relatives. If we trace things back to the
start, we shall probably find that practically all the
moral problems which we have to face, in ourselves
or in other people, have one of the primary instincts
at their root. That is why, for our immediate
purpose, the study of instinct is so necessary.

The way in which instinct baffled becomes tempta-
tion is described by St Paul in a piece of piercing self-
analysis to which we shall have to refer more than once:

" I had not known sin apart from the law :
for I had not known lust unless the law had
said ' Thou shalt not lust 5 : but sin, finding
occasion, wrought in me through the com-
mandment all manner of lust : for apart from
the law, sin is dead." a

1 The most useful book on sin from the biological point of view is
probably Dr Pennant's Origin of Sin. (Cambridge Univ. Press.)
a Rom. vii. ^ (R.V. marg.).

'9

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

How are we to deal with these violent forces ?

To destroy them is impossible: and we can do
nothing more disastrous, whether morally or physi-
cally, than to tell people they must root them out.
We must deal with them in some other way.

The force of instinct is imperious, and an outlet
for its energy must be found. Any attempt to
drive it underground can only issue in disaster, in an
imperilling of our moral life, and sometimes even of
our sanity. Psychological experts are agreed that a
very large proportion of nervous and mental dis-
orders are due to such repression of an instinct
denying it its outlet and satisfaction. Hence spring
all kinds of horrible " perversions " and many
diseases that destroy the soul. Balked of its outlet,
instinct rages in us like a furious and destructive
beast, often making havoc of our lives. Psychology
here re-echoes Our Lord's teaching. Drive an
instinct out, and it comes back with seven other
devils more wicked than itself, and the last state of the
man is worse than the first. Thus it appears that we
cannot literally " let the ape and tiger die/' The
tiger is not so easily killed as that : nor can he
merely be caged behind iron bars there are no bars
strong enough to hold him. Psychology here agrees
with Religion that the only practical course is to
" convert " him.

f: We have said that these instinctive impulses
cannot be eradicated. But they can to such an
extent be modified by experience and training that
it may be even difficult to recognize them. We
saw above that instinctive actions may be more, or
less, enlightened by intelligence. Intelligence may

20

INSTINCT

gradually begin to apprehend successive stages in the
complex process until in the end, when we reach the
human level, it is able to understand the ultimate
aim i.e. " to grasp the final purpose and meaning of
conduct* ... As this development proceeds, the
need for detailed determination of response by hered-
ity disappears." l As we assume intelligent control
of our native processes, we can redirect them. Thus
the impulse-issuing-in-action can be trained to
respond to a different or " higher " stimulus than
that which originally calls it forth. Similarly, the
action in which it issues can be modified in a
" higher " direction, so that the instinct finds its
outlet in increasingly ideal satisfaction. Such in-
stincts as in themselves are anti-social can be trained
to social ends, and a moral or religious expression can
take the place of one that is merely physical. 2 Thus
instincts cannot be changed or rooted out : but
they can be converted or sublimated ; and their
energy can be transferred along other instinctive
channels. For example, it is often seen how a
balked parental instinct transfers itself to acquisi-
tiveness : the childless man becomes a miser. The
hunting instinct finds its outlet in collecting postage-
stamps. These facts are commonplace, and they
show how we are to set to work. Dr Hadfield
points out the extent to which the various instincts,
conflicting with one another and with society, tend
to become self -destructive. A man only attains his
full power and freedom when they are functioning
in a social direction. 8 For example, the self-

1 Hobhouse, op. cit., p. 77. 2 McDougall, Chap. VII.

8 In The Spirit, p. 94.

21

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

assertive instinct can be trained to become social,
the man identifying himself with a cause or a lover pr
a country, so that his self instinct works altruisti-
cally. It is needless to multiply examples. Any-
body can think of half a hundred. But this gives
us the key to what the psychologists teach about
the^sublimation of our instincts. Thus, when the
force of some instinctive impulse cannot (for any
reason, moral or physical) be used in the ordinary
biological way, its energies may and must be trans-
ferred. This transference of instinctive energies
will be found to be one of the prime facts in our
moral and religious life.

So far as religion concerns moral action, we shall
find that its solution consists largely in offering us
right lines for " sublimation." But this, and the
broader question of the attitude of Christianity to
the inherited instincts, we must leave for discussion
in a later lecture.

22

CHAPTER II.

THE UNCONSCIOUS.

WE have seen already that some of the prime springs
of our moral and intellectual lives lie very deep down
in our nature below the levels of everyday thought
and act. We have now to see that in fact the greater
part of our ordinary everyday lives, even those acts
which we most take for granted, are to a very great
extent determined by causes of which we are often
quite unaware. The discovery of the Unconscious,
which marks, on the whole, the most important
advance of the new psychology upon the old, and
has had such revolutionary effects, especially in the
psychology of Religion, is chiefly connected with
F. W. H. Myers. 1 It was he who first began scientifi-
cally to explore and map out that uncharted country
to whose existence somehow, in some form, all human
experience bears witness. In great moments of
mystic exaltation the soul takes wings and visits
some far land, which, when she sees it, she knows to
be her home. Prophet and poet, seer and lover, all
testify to this experience : " We feel that we are
greater than we know." But there are also continual
invasions savage and friendly, mystical or beastly

1 William James in Varieties, p. 233, dates the recognition of the
" subliminal " 1886. Myers 1 book, Human Personality and the Survival
of Bodily Death was first published in 1902. There is now ^one-volume
edition of it in cheap form.

23

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

crossing the frontier and entering into our mind,
often rudely disturbing the inhabitants. Myers set
himself to chart out this region from which, or
through which, enter into us impulses, desires and
imaginations, so diverse in kind and moral quality
the inspiration of the seer and the fierce obsession
of the lunatic, the intuition of the genius, the
prophet's vision and the sensualist's dream and
found it to be a part of our own selves lying outside
waking consciousness. 1 Indeed the thoughts of our
waking consciousness, with which the older writers
on psychology were exclusively concerned, are but a
very little part of us. The field of consciousness at
any moment is but a tiny section of ourselves. There
are great reaches above, below, and around it,
running out to the circumference, which are integral
parts of what we call our minds, though we may not
be at any given moment or indeed, at any moment
conscious of them. This is Myers' " subliminal "
self, now known generally as the " unconscious."
Between it and the conscious mind there is constant
interchange and interaction, with results which we
must examine later on.

Since Myers' time the maps have become more
detailed. The pioneer work of the " analytical
psychologists " (led by Freud at Vienna and Jung
at Zurich) has enabled us to know far more accur-
ately the nature of this mysterious land, and some-
thing about the laws which govern it. Terminology
has become more accurate. This idea of an " un-
conscious," which seems at first sight so ridiculous,

* On the "subliminal" see Myers, Chaps. II. and III. ; Pratt, Religious
$) Chap. III. ; James, Vaneties, Chaps. VIII.-X.

24

THE UNCONSCIOUS

is the basis of all the most fruitful modern work :
and it is important for us to try and grasp not
merely the fact of its existence, but at least the
elements of how it works. This is the great contrib-
ution of the " new " psychology. At the same
time it is necessary to realize that this fundamental
postulate is still the subject of much disagreement.
The two pioneer workers, Freud and Jung, represent
different interpretations, and the English writers
differ very widely* 1 Thus it is impossible to be dog-
matic, or to enter into any technical detail. It is
only right, however, to warn the reader that the
matter is not anything like so simple as I shall try
in this lecture to make it appear. We shall leave out
everything that is not essential.

The Unconscious, as the term is used by Freud,
and as most of the current popular statements of the
new psychology seem to understand it, refers to
something which is secondary, and, in a sense, highly
sophisticated. Freud means by it certain parts of
consciousness which are " repressed " and barred out
from consciousness, because for some reason in our
personal history they are painful to us or regarded
as illegitimate. Certainly there are such elements,
and we shall have to discuss them in a moment. (See
pp. 35 sq.) But this is not the whole of the Uncon-
scious. The current idea that what lies below the
threshold is something which we ought not to talk
about, is due, no doubt, to a crude familiarity with
the Freudian conception to the exclusion of all other
elements. In what follows we shall mean by the

1 I follow Tansley, The New Psychology, Chap, IV, and Hart,
Psychology of Insanity, Chap. V.

25

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

Lfaconscious all those regions of the mind of which
we are not, at a given moment, conscious. Of these
some, like normal memories, enter into consciousness
when we require them. Others, as Freud insists,
have been " repressed," and can only enter con-
sciousness indirectly and by subterfuges. While it
is probable that there are tracts which have never
yet been and possibly cannot be fully explored
by the lamp of conscious reason. 1

We can start from a perfectly familiar fact of our
commonest experience. If we examine the stream
of our own thoughts, we shall find they are con-
stantly being interrupted. Sudden "inspirations"
come to us : ideas, images and thoughts flash into the
mind, quite unexpectedly and inexplicably, breaking
the flow of our connected thinking. 2 " Wandering
thoughts " are well known to us all. These ideas
have no recognizable cause in the ideas that preceded
them, and so (being conscious of some disconnection)
we tend to say that they are accidental : they come
into our minds, we say, " from nowhere."

But nothing happens without a cause : and if the
cause cannot be found in the ideas that have pre-
ceded them, we must look for a sufficient cause else-
where. This very simple but very important fact
was what first led to the hypothesis that there must
be activities or functions of the mind, having their
effects in consciousness, of which we are not ourselves
directly conscious. Memory is another fact of the
kind. Here there are stored-up thoughts and ex-
periences lying " somewhere " in our minds, which

1 There is an illustrative diagram in Tansley, p. 44.
9 Tansley, Chap. IV.

26

THE UNCONSCIOUS

at the touch of a certain stimulus find themselves
back in our waking minds again. The most fascinat-
ing groups of facts calling for some such notion to
explain them are obviously those which are supplied
by reflecting on the mysterious world of dreams. 1
Again, it is not otherwise with our actions. Often
an impulse suddenly enters the mind, and before we
know where we are, we commit an action of which,
looking back, we say, quite truthfully, " I really
don't know why I behaved like that." But there
was a cause, and the cause is to be sought in the
operations of the Unconscious.

In all these cases, the machinery which has been at
work has been the same. It is what used to be called
in the older books, the " association of ideas." We
must picture the contents of our minds not as a
number of isolated thoughts, but as systems of
thought in certain combinations. 3 Some writers
prefer to state the matter differently. The mind,
they consider, retains not its ideas so much as the
condition of their revival ; that is, it is like a record
for the gramophone not in itself the actual music,
but a condition of its reproduction. But even so,
they are grouped in a certain scheme, and function,
when revived, in association. The record plays the
tune which it has recorded.

Now, most of these networks of associations are
grouped in some form, direct or indirect, round one
or other of the great primary instincts, and each is
charged with a certain emotional quality, stronger

1 See below, p. 39, with references.

2 For the physiological processes in Association, see James, Text-book
of Psychology* Chap. XVL

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

or weaker, as the case may be. Not all of these
associated systems (which are what psychology calls
" complexes ") 1 are active in the mind at any
moment* Normally we are conscious in the
morning of all the ideas and emotions which
centre round our work, in the afternoon, possibly
our recreation, and in the evening some other set
of interests.

The mention of the office or the study tends to
call the first into consciousness : but all the others
are there below the surface, and when the appro-
priate stimulus occurs, they become active in the
field of- thought, drawing into their association all
other systems and images and interests which are
capable of being connected with them, and with a
tendency to drive out the others. For example,
how little provocation is needed to make an enthusi-
astic golfer drown the conversation by talking
" golf-shop." The more devoted to the game he is,
the more he sees everything in terms of golf. Golf
tends to control his thoughts and actions. In the
office, when his work is occupying the field of his
conscious thought, he sees from the window the
tram that runs to the links. The golf associations
are called in. Away fly work and business from his
mind, and the golf system holds the field. This is
the process which is at work in memory, and in all
the other cases we have examined. In that ordinary

1 Many psychologists use the word " complex " to denote only morbid,
unhealthy or pathological associations. I use it here and all through in
the extended sense given by Hart, and Tansley who follows his usage.
In this book, technicalities are so far as possible avoided, because nearly
every writer uses the technical terms in a different sense. This is what
makes the subject so difficult and complicated at present.

28

THE UNCONSCIOUS

memory on which any ordered mind depends, the
process has become automatic. It needs no
effort when we see a tree, to connect it with
other trees which we have seen. When we
have food upon our forks, we do not have to
think what the next step is : association functions
automatically.

Here are examples of association which do in fact
control our thoughts and actions, though we are
not conscious that they are being made. This
process extends throughout our mental life. When
we act, as we say, without knowing why, it is just
the same thing which is happening. Something
stimulates an association of emotions and ideas
below the surface, and they at once become active
in consciousness, supplying the motive, as we say,
for action. Here is the clue to the " unconscious
motive." We have seen that any system of interests,
when it is actively functioning in the mind, tends to
banish others. The golfer tends to see bunkers in
running brooks and golf in everything. The artist
looking at a landscape, sees it in terms of his own art :
the soldier tejls you that it is " fine country for
fighting what ? "

Now, in these cases, the man is probably aware
of the associations that operate in his mind. The
soldier will say, " Yes, fighting is my profession, and
because Pm interested in my profession it is that
aspect of the country that appeals to me." Even
here, we shall not fail to notice how easily a " bias "
gets into the mind : our dominant interests always
affect our thinking. But we can go further. There
are other cases in which a man's thoughts and acts

29

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

are determined by causes of which he is not at all
aware, and of which he would much prefer to remain
ignorant. During the Tariff Reform controversy
there were many enthusiastic Unionists or personal
admirers of Joseph Chamberlain, who accepted with
avidity all the arguments telling for Tariff Reform.
The bent of their minds in this particular direction
led them to banish or rule out all anti-Chamberlain
ideas which were incompatible with this dominant
complex. They simply could not see the force of
the Free Trade arguments : they were so obviously
unconvincing !

These enthusiasts argued hotly for Tariff Reform,
producing a long string of arguments, convinced
that they were taking a perfectly logical line.
But, in fact, they were doing nothing of the kind.
Their thinking on the subject was determined, not
by logic, but by the strength of the Chamberlain
associations, that is, really by quite non-rational
causes. The psychology of the party politician,
which is a commonplace of the text-books, supplies
a very obvious example of the way in which our
intellectual processes are controlled by causes of
which we are not aware, and which are very often
the reverse of rational. Yet, as we hate to think
(if we are Englishmen) that we are acting otherwise
than rationally, we invent for ourselves a string of
reasons for the line of thought we adopt, or the act
we do, honestly thinking that they are the causes,
whereas, in fact, they are nothing of the sort. Little
of our thought is strictly logical, and few of the
reasons we give are the real causes which determine
either our actions or our thoughts. As Dr Inge

30

THE UNCONSCIOUS

laconically puts it : " Individuals sometimes act
rationally, crowds never. 55

The process which we have been investigating,
which is technically called " rationalization, 55 is very
important for us in our own sphere. It enters into
Religion and Theology more, perhaps, than we
altogether realize. Hart gives an instance of a
Sunday School teacher who suddenly became an
Atheist. He read up the subject and argued
weightily, demolishing all the traditional " proofs 55
of God. He honestly thought that these arguments
were his reasons. But the real reason was, as was
afterwards discovered, that he had been jilted by a
lady who taught the girls in the same Sunday
School. The intense force of these associations led
him to welcome every argument telling against the
thoughts associated with those disappointing Sunday
afternoons. 1 The correspondence columns of the
Church Press often supply magnificent examples in
which to watch this machinery at work. The over-
whelming and elaborate arguments which people
produce to support some small traditionalism in
ceremonial or doctrine, or (equally) some clear-eyed
Modernism, are often determined by quite non-
rational causes. Their hobby happens to be that
special form of ecclesiology, or their social instinct
draws them very closely to the particular group that
holds these tenets. It is really that which decides
their beliefs. Many things again, are often held to
be demanded of a Christian, which are really dictated
if the truth were known by social convention or
business interests.

1 Hart, op. cit., pp. 71, 72,

31

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

In fact, a " wholesale acceptance of non-rationaj
beliefs must be looked upon as normal." l It is
obvious that this tendency of the mind is the very
cement of human societies, and it is the common-
place of History that the free activity of critical
reason is inevitably suspected and repressed as a
dangerous solvent of social stability. The tragic
story of the persecutions is more than a revelation of
blind cruelty. It is dictated by the mighty instinct
of self-preservation in the group. A struggling
group cannot afford " heretics." But, from our
present point of view, if we wish to be sincere in
thought and act, we must notice the recognized
force of these mass-suggestions and be unweariedly
on our guard against them.

It appears, then, that if (as we have seen) our
thought is so largely controlled by factors that
are not really logical, it is an extraordinarily unwise
proceeding to require intellectual assent to a given
set of propositions as a condition of Church-member-
ship. There is no trace that Our Lord ever did so.
He made uncompromizing claims : but He never
asked for a " declaration of assent." We are right
to make Christianity difficult, but we make it diffi-
cult in the wrong way. We confront people with
the wrong kind of difficulties. And we know too
much about the antecedents of intellectual beliefs
to attach a very high value to formal " Orthodoxy*"
On the other hand, it must never be forgotten that
we are endowed with reason and a will, and the main
value of investigation into our unconscious processes

1 Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, p. 36, This is
a most stimulating and important book.

32

THE UNCONSCIOUS

is to bring these into the full daylight of reason, and
under the direction of conscious will. Real " Ortho-
doxy " means " thinking straight." We can see
then, as the other aspect of my last statement, the
tremendous force of Our Lord's emphasis on intel-
lectual sincerity and the need of the single eye and
the pure heart if we are ever truly to know God.
Thinking is not merely intellectual : it is a function
of our whole personality. And whether we can
think truly and justly, and so have the means to
guide our lives aright, depends very largely on our
characters, which are, at least in part, in our own
control. " Whosoever wills to do the will of God,
he shall know the doctrine."

It is, of course, in the case of moral action that this
process of self-deception works most plainly. Very
often we do not honestly know why it was that we
acted as we did. But equally often we deceive our-
selves. Having done an act of which we are ashamed,
there is never a lack of impressive arguments to
justify it to ourselves and to others. We must try
to track the motive to its roots. 1

The heart of man, as all the moral teachers have
affirmed with monotonous reiteration, is desperately
wicked and deceitful above all things, and no advice
is harder than " Know thyself." So that some
slight knowledge of the actual way in which this
process of self-deception operates is of infinite value
in facing our own lives, and dealing with the lives
>f other people. Not infrequently our diagnosis,
we are faced with sins or " cases of conscience,"

1 Cf. Pym, Psychology and the Christian Life, Chap. V. (on Self-
examination and Psycho-analysis).

33 c

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

tends to deal with the symptoms, not the cause. We
must recall the repeated emphasis which Our Lord
laid in so many different forms on the reversal of our
human judgments when the secrets of the heart are
known to God. " There are first which shall be
last, and there are last which shall be first." It is
not only that no man among us is good enough to
judge another (" Judge not and ye shall not be
judged ") : it is that so few of us can judge ourselves.
" I know nothing against myself," said St Paul,
" but I am not thereby justified ; He that judgeth
me is the Lord " (i Cor. iv. 4). It is possible, as
Our Lord pointed out in one of His most devastating
sayings, for even the most sincere and unselfish of us
to be wholly deceived about our own motives.
" Many will say to me on that day, * Lord, have we
not preached in Your Name, and in Your Name
undertaken the cure of souls, and in Your Name
done much powerful work ? 5 Then I shall declare
unto them, I have never owned you, leave me, you
have been doing the devil's work " (Matt. vii. 22).
The facts we have described throw light on all
this. And so, if we are to preserve our integrity,
we must try to penetrate relentlessly to the secret
springs of action and most humiliating the process
is. " No one must expect to live in contact with
the unconscious without being constantly humili-
ated." l But unless we attempt unsparingly to
expose the unseen motives which actuate us, our
thinking may be hopelessly perverted and our moral
judgments and actions masked and blinded by a
cloud which we have ourselves created. There is

* M Nicoll, Dream-psychology t p. 187.
34

THE UNCONSCIOUS

what Plato calls the lie in the soul. " If the light
that is within us is darkness, how great is the dark-
ness ! " It is the " mote and the beam " over again.

It is through the machinery we have been examin-
ing that there are brought about those states of
discord and conflict in the mind when " the house
is divided against, itself " and may ultimately " be
brought to desolation." Suppose a man has two
powerful systems of associated ideas and emotions
which are incompatible with one another, or of
which one is inconsistent with the general tenor of
his character or the moral ideals to which he owns
allegiance. A conflict must inevitably arise. One
may centre round the service of his fellows (the
social instinct is at the root of it) and the other
round his personal ambition (with the self-assertive
instinct as its driving-power). The two systems
are incompatible. Hence arises the familiar story
of the divided life, with all its misery, its paralysis
and loss of power. But nobody can live always in
this state. " It is a biological necessity that some
way out of the impasse should be found." l For
nobody, in the end, can serve two masters. The
ideal way, which most of us pursue in the ordinary
decisions of our life, is to face the discord and make
our deliberate choice. So Our Lord was always forc-
ing people to face up to their conflicts and make their
choice. You cannot set hands to the plough and then
look back ; you cannot be a Mr Facing-Both-Ways,
if your life is to be a life of power and happiness.

But such decisions are often painful: they may
mean cutting off the hand and plucking out the eye.

* Hart, p. 79.

35

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

And the mind has many ways of avoiding this.
One way is the method of water-tight compart-
ments. We allow both systems to function side by
side, never allowing them to meet, and so conceal
from ourselves their opposition. That is, we con-
tinue to lead what other people, looking on, call
" inconsistent lives." The system which centres
round our business interests (with the acquisitive
instinct at its root) may be obviously inconsistent
with that which centres round our religious beliefs.
We avoid the collision by holding them apart,
living in a real sense " double lives," keeping each
system wholly opaque to the other. Anyone can
think of a dozen instances of what we should all
(in the case of other people) call, without further
ado, " hypocrisy." But to call it names does not
solve the problem. And the problem for Religion
is just that so to unify our lives, that all the
different systems of thought and feeling, each with
their own particular standard of conduct, are
co-ordinated round the service of God. Most of
us are still frankly polytheists. We acknowledge
three or four conflicting principles in the conduct
of our lives. But the Lord our God, as the Master
said, is one Lord; and we have to learn to love Him
with all our hearts, and all our minds and souls and
strength. If that is ever achieved in any of us,
then we shall have been genuinely " converted."
(We shall deal with this in Chapter IV. below.)

The extreme cases of this attempted solution run
up into the region of insanity the familiar stories
of " disintegrated personality " (technically called
"Dissociation") where the patient literally lives

36

THE UNCONSCIOUS

two lives, living now in one and now in the other
without any conscious relation between the two.
A patient thinks he is a poached egg, and at the same
time spends his days weeding the garden-path in
the asylum. The classic case, of course, is Jekyll and
Hyde. Ansell Bourne and Sally Beauchamp are
the stock examples of the text-books, and many
astounding instances are quoted in the appendices
to Myers' book.

We are also here, I think, treading on the threshold
of that dim world of divided souls which the New
Testament calls demoniac possession, where one of
the dissociated selves takes the guise of a frightful
outside force, driving the sufferer along to misery.
As an instance, the man who said his name was
" Division," so many hosts were driving him along
(Mark v. 9).

Where the inconsistency between the two systems
is acutely realized by the mind, an escape is sought
by a very elaborate process of rationalization to
avoid the conflict. The mind will invent and act
out an elaborate pose, moving in a perpetual delusion.
Nowhere are these delusions more easily manu-
factured, and nowhere have we to be more ware of
them, than in the sphere of our religious life. Let
us take a trivial example, which will serve to suggest
others of a more far-reaching kind. A Christian
who is temperamentally self-indulgent may persuade
himself that he overeats himself " to keep up his
strength for the service of the Church," or because
his luxury is " good for trade." We often meet
more furious delusions, far more calamitous in their
results, which are manufactured in this manner.

37

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

And here, too, we have the origin of many of those
fierce obsessions common in the records of insanity.

The alternative way out is the method of repres-
sion. If there is incompatibility, we try to drive
one of the systems underground, repress it 5 or
inhibit it from action. A mild and interesting
form of this is seen in familiar cases of lost memory.
Why do we forget the name of that place or person
at the critical moment ? Often it is for reasons
of that kind. The name is connected with an
association which is painful to remember perhaps
because we are ashamed of it and we try, therefore,
to keep it in the cellar. That place-name that so
absurdly escapes our memory is connected with
unpleasant associations ; we had a quarrel with our
friend there, or we got there hungry and the lunch
was nasty : and so the mechanism of our minds
takes steps to prevent the memory from reviving. 1

This is frequently the means adopted to deal with
affections or interests which, for any reason, we
cannot satisfy. We try to drive them out of our
conscious minds : and we do, but they do not
therefore cease to function. They find their outlet
indirectly, often by means of elaborate symbolism.
Many of our dreams, but by no means all, are pos-
sibly explicable along these lines. A wish that we
have not been able to satisfy, and have sought to
banish from our minds, regains its entrance under
the disguise of the elaborate dream-symbolism, or
by means of ungovernable impulses. That is why
the analysis of dreams is considered so important

1 On all this, see Freud, Psycho-pathology in Everyday Life (E.T.),
Chap. Ill-

38

THE UNCONSCIOUS

bj those who seek to cure a mind diseased by probing
its secret hopes and fears and conflicts, which is the
business of psycho-analysis.

This is the famous Freudian theory of dream-
interpretation. According to it every dream is an
unfulfilled wish (very frequently a baffled wish)
and for Freud every wish is sexual expressing itself
in our consciousness through the disguise of a symbol
and dream-image. It is possible that this is largely
true. But certainly not all dreams can be so inter-
preted. Some, according to a larger theory, are
foreshadowings of future actions the life-force,
pushing out in a new direction, 1 first presenting
itself in symbolical guise. If this be so, then the
old-world theory that dreams are prophetic is not
devoid of truth, and Joseph and the old prognosti-
cators might still appear in respectable society.

But to return, this process of repression is both
mentally and morally charged with the gravest
dangers. Nearly all the nervous and mental ills
with which psychological medicine has to deal, are
traceable to it in one form or another. We shall see
it, too, in demoniac possession when we come to
examine that mysterious subject and seek to discover
the thought of Our Lord about it.

Let us remember what was said above, that practi-
cally all these systems have one of the great instincts
at their root. Thus all these cases of conflict and
repression are concerned in the end with the

function and regulation of one or other of our

1 M. Nicoll, op. cit. 9 works on Jung's theory as contrasted with
that of Freud. W. H. Rivers' Conflict and Dream (Kegan Paul) was not
published in time for me to make use of it.

39

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

inherited instincts sex (more often than we care fo
think) and still more frequently the gregariojis
impulse, which is perhaps, when all is said azid
done, the dominant force in the lives of all of us.

Thus the problem for the mind -practitioner,
and the problem for Religion, is the harmonizing
of conflicting systems and the regulation of in-
stinctive impulses, so as to give power and freedom
and the fullest possible self-expression to the life of
the individual. The answer of Christianity to this
will occupy us in a later lecture.

CHAPTER III.

SUGGESTION AND WILL.

THE mapping out of the Unconscious is so highly
controversial, and raises such fascinating specula-
tions, that one is tempted to deal with it at length.
It is best, however, to leave it to the experts, re-
ferring the reader to the books mentioned, and con-
tenting ourselves here with the barest skeleton,
enough to make intelligible what follows, and to
show at least what the main problems are. We
must now pass to a closely connected subject the
laws and machinery of Suggestion, the investigation
of which is certainly bringing us to the gateway of a
new world of power and knowledge. In this Section
I shall mainly follow Baudouin's book Suggestion and
Auto-suggestion, " the most exciting book since
The Origin of Species," as an early review described
it. It needs to be read, I think, extremely critically,
and I shall sometimes make bold to criticize it. But
it must be remembered that the book is not con-
cerned, by the scope of its own plan, with religious
or philosophical questions. It is in the main a
medical text-book an account of clinical practice
in Psycho-therapy in the New Nancy School under
Cou6. It is, therefore, not altogether reasonable
to expect from it a satisfactory treatment of pro-

4 1

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

blems in ethics or metaphysics, though these in-
evitably confront the reader.

We have^ noticed already something of the extent
to which unconscious processes influence some
would say definitely control our lives. It is then,
obviously enough, a matter of quite paramount
importance, if we are to be masters of ourselves, that
we should know how to control these mighty forces,
and use for the highest purposes of life the immense
energy that is locked up in them. For this, as
was suggested at the beginning, is the line of all
genuine advance and progress. We can harness the
stream of the unconscious and turn its crude force
into effective " power " by the use of what has come
to be called Suggestion. /

Here, at the outset, we must empty our minds of a
popular, but quite unfounded notion, that Sugges-
tion is the equivalent of delusion. In our ordinary
language, if we say of an idea or belief that it is
" merely auto-suggestion," we commonly mean that
there is " nothing in it," that it is the invention of a
deluded mind. Now, of course, it is true that no
mental process is, or can ever be, entirely fool-proof.
There is always the possibility of error. A man
may be sure that he positively knows something
which, in fact, is not true. There are other facts
which he has not considered, or some unnoticed
flaw in his reasoning, or some unconscious bias in his
mind, so that the knowledge he claims is not really
knowledge. However difficult it may be found as a
matter of pure philosophical speculation to give an
intelligent account of it, we all recognize that error is
possible. But, nevertheless, the whole fact of know-

42

SUGGESTION AND WILL

ledge (in so far as it really is knowledge) is of knowing
something which is " there " to be known quite
independently of our knowing it. If our minds
change or affect a thing in the process of perceiving
it, then what happens is something else, not know-
ledge. We make it, or alter it, or what you will : we
certainly do not know it as it is. If we suppose that
our minds create their objects in the act that we call
knowing them, no less than if as modern theories
tend with increasing emphasis to suggest we create
the moral values by which we live, we reduce the
world to an utter, hopeless chaos. For all truth and
all right action involve the correspondence of our
mind with facts and values and relations which are
part of the constitution of Reality. The way of
stating this in popular speech is to say that know-
ledge is " objective."

It is highly important for us to realize that, what-
ever else we may say about it later, and whatever the
possibilities of error suggestion is as " objective " as
knowledge.

In the absolutely literal sense auto-suggestion is
impossible. 1 You can only suggest what is " there "
to be suggested. So that suggestion, as a mental
instrument, can no more than knowledge alter
things : it can only alter our attitude to things. It
cannot make something out of nothing : it cannot
make a lie out of truth : it cannot change a bad thing
into a good thing. But it can give us power to over-
come the evil, and to accept and act upon the
truth.

1 See Rouse and Crichton Miller, Christian Experience and Psycho-
logical Processes (S.C.M.), pp. 102-104.

43

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

Another mistake, which perhaps we need hardly
combat, is to confuse the process called Suggestion
with the melodramatic idea of Hypnotism, as though
in our weakness and dependence we surrendered
ourselves, our wills, and destinies, into the power of
some sinister, stronger will. This is ridiculous, as
anybody who reads Baudouin's book will see at once.
Psycho-therapists at the present time seem to employ
Hypnotism very little : and even then the whole
point of suggestion is not to impose our wishes and
ideas on the will of a reluctant victim, but rather
the opposite to help the patient to accept for him-
self a beneficial idea, to make it his own and
translate it into action.

This is what leads Baudouin to remark that auto-
suggestion is the true type of all suggestion. What
he means is this. There are two possibilities. You
can make a suggestion to yourself, or some other
person can make it to you. The former process is
Auto- or Self-suggestion, the latter, Hetero- or
Other-suggestion. But, even in the second of these
processes, the suggestion cannot become effective
until it has been accepted by the patient, made his
own and worked into his own life. Then it becomes
in a true sense Self-suggestion. It goes without
saying, of course, that a feeling of confidence, trust
and affection for him who makes the suggestion,
plays a large part in enabling the patient to accept the
idea from him and make it his own. We can see,
,then, already that the tremendous emphasis which
Religion has always thrown on Trust and Farth, is not
without its psychological basis. That we shall have
to discuss more fully soon. Meanwhile it is time

44

SUGGESTION AND WILL

we came to grips more closely with a statement of
what Suggestion really is.

It is one of the commonest facts of our experience
that a problem which has baffled us overnight is
found solved when we wake up in the morning. We
commonly say that it has " solved itself," so little
aware are we of our share in it. Strictly speaking,
we are talking nonsense. It is obviously our mind
which has solved it, but it has done so without our
knowing it. In other words we can here catch sight
of the secret, on which the whole idea of Suggestion
rests, of Nature's favourite labour-saving device.
Our " Unconscious " has solved the problem while
our conscious minds were at rest in sleep. 1 Our
tired brains have handed the problem over to the
unconscious, which has done the work for them.
Suggestion means, in effect, the deliberate use of the
machinery which is here disclosed. Thus the
simplest of the definitions which Baudouin gives is
nothing more than this : the subconscious realization
of an idea. 9

The process admits of very wide extension.
It is not confined to intellectual tasks, like the
solving of a mathematical problem. It is also
operative in the sphere of action, in conduct
and in our vital processes. An idea that is once
accepted by the unconscious tends without conscious
effort on our part to realize itself in action. Any-
body can satisfy himself by a number of elementary
experiments that there is this power in the un-

1 The common phrase u unconscious cerebration" would appear to be
a contradiction in terms.
8 Op. cit.> p, 26.

45

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

conscious mind of controlling our bodies without
our knowing it. 1

The real heart of the suggestion-process is this
translation of idea into action, otherwise than by
deliberate volition. So that Baudouin gives as a
second definition,, the transformation of an idea into
action. But the idea has first to be " accepted/' so
that we may in fact analyse three stages ; of which
the first two steps are deliberate, and the third, the
result, is achieved by the unconscious.

1, The presentation of the suggestion by

another, or by the patient to himself.

2, Its acceptance by the patient.

3, Its transformation into act.

Some knowledge of the working of this process
seems to be nearly as old as the human race. For it
is probable that many facts which have commonly
been regarded as " Black Magic," or (if they are
beneficent) as " Miracle," admit of explanation by
this law. No doubt, a vast amount of old-world
magic, the recipes for lovers' philtres, the sticking
of pins into a waxen image, the turning of the wry-
neck on the wheel, and all the primitive lore of
" mimetic " magic which Anthropology has made
familiar, rest on a childish theory of causation. Our
science, in sweeping it away for ever, has freed the
race from a crushing burden of terror, cruelty and
superstition. But what are we to say to some forms

1 For example, stretch out your arm at full length and suggest to your-
self that it will be seized with palsied tremors. A strange twitching will
at once begin and your hand will soon be shaking like a leaf. You can
then stop it with another suggestion. Perhaps the best is Coup's First
Experiment (see Suggestion and Auto- Suggestion, pp* 209*214).

4 6

SUGGESTION AND WILL

of " witchcraft " ? It is, it appears, an indisputable
fact that if a man believes he has been bewitched,
that an evil eye has been cast upon him which is
going to bring him to his death, then on the
appointed day he retires to his hut, lays himself down
on the ground and surely dies. Quite apart from
its moral quality, or the religious attitude involved,
the same machinery of the mind would seem to be in
operation here as, say, in the miracles at Lourdes
or, if you prefer it, the Temple of Asklepios. Making
all allowance for imposture (to which Temple-cures,
whether old or new, are notoriously exposed) I do
not think it possible to doubt that a good proportion
of these results did, and do, occur as recorded.
There does not seem to be any essential difference
between them and the familiar experiment of
raising a blister by suggestion, or of winning a boat-
race by the same method. " They can because they
believe they can " as Virgil said about that long ago.

It seems to be the law of human life that according
to our faith it is done unto us. Those who believe in
the strength of hatred and evil are apt to find them-
selves their helpless victims. Those who believe in
the triumphant power of love can overcome them-
selves and the world. So Christ declared in the
Sermon on the Mount. It is this law, so terrible
in its potency, so charged with illimitable possi-
bilities, that we want to employ to advance the
Kingdom of God.

It is being used with startling results in what is
now called Psycho-therapy. Thus, a " shell-shock "
patient who is paralysed may recover the use of
his limb through suggestion-treatment. The

47

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

method employed by a leading practitioner is
described by him somewhat as follows : l Suppose
a man has the use of his arms quite normally, but
is paralysed in his legs. The doctor may casually
say to him, " You will find you cannot lift your
right arm." The patient will, as a rul$, when he
tries to lift it, find it is held fast to his side. It will
then be explained, " There is nothing the matter
with your arm, it is exactly as it was yesterday, the
only reason why you could not lift it was that
(accepting my suggestion) you had made up your
mind that you could not do so. Now, why can't
you move your legs ? Just for the same reason,
because you think you cannot. But I tell you that
you can," The patient then proceeds to walk
normally and discovers that his paralysis has gone.

In these and similar cases, it should be noted, the
disease which is thus treated is functional only. That
is to say, that what is thus put right is something
wrong, in the end, in the man's mind. It is not an
organic disease in the limb concerned. The dis-
tinction between organic and functional has hitherto
been regarded as fundamental, and the methods of
psycho-therapy have been supposed to be only of
value in the latter case. It is now, however, claimed
by Baudouin that Coup's practice has made this
distinction obsolete, and that any organic disease
will yield to treatment by suggestion. If so, it
would seem that there is literally no limit to its
possibilities. But it would be dangerous for the
layman, in the absence of further medical opinion,
to take this conclusion as too certain. We can only

1 Hadfield in The Spirit, pp. 84-86.

SUGGESTION AND WILL

remark that the claim has been made, though I think
it is doubtful whether the evidence is as yet sufficient
to establish it. The specialists' verdict, of course,
might be different.

But, even if we should have to confine ourselves
within the narrower sphere of functional cases,
enormous possibilities open before us. " The deaf
hear, the blind receive their sight, and the lame
walk " every day by the almost magical power of
this new method. And as we read the record of
such cures, some of the stories and sayings in the
Gospel flash irresistibly into the mind.

A man once came to Our Lord with a paralysed
hand hanging helplessly by his side. He asked to be
cured. Our Lord said something to him which
people could only take to be sheer folly. He told him
to stretch out his hand. (" You can, you know," He
said to him in effect.) To everyone's astonishment,
he did, " and it was restored whole like the other."
Again, the father of a boy who was (as the story says)
" possessed by a demon " came to Jesus and implored
His help. " If you can do anything," he said, " have
pity on us and help us." Jesus said to him, " If you
can. Anything can be done if a man has faith "
(Mark ix. 22, 23).

But it is plain that the method of suggestion is not
confined to the sphere of bodily health, or even of
what are called " nervous ills." Its moral aspect is
of supreme importance, and we must devote a short
discussion to it. We have seen that suggestion
works in both directions, the negative as well as the
positive. *' If you suggest to yourself that you can,
you can : if you suggest to yourself that you can't,

49 D

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

you can't." It would seem that this would take us a
long way in dealing with sin, and especially sinful
habits. And Baudouin goes so far as to put it thus :
A man is the slave of a bad habit so long as he thinks
he is, and no longer.

When we advise a man to " break " a habit, we are
asking, often, an impossibility. His will has been so
weakened and impaired by constant yielding to the
evil impulse, that he has not sufficient strength of
will to ourst his chains and break through to moral
freedom. 1 He pleads that such advice is entirely
futile : " the harder I try, the more impossible it is."
Baudouin's reply is at first sight rather startling:
" It is not his will that needs re-educating : it is his
imagination/ 5 This is the famous Law of Reversed,
Effort, which may be stated in the following way :
When Will and Imagination come into conflict (or at
least, let us say, when this conflict reaches a certain
pitch of intensity), Imagination always wins?

At this point, we must pause and find our bearings.
For we seem to be losing touch with the one fact of
human life about which we should claim certainty,
namely, the primacy of the will. Suggestion seems
at first sight to dethrone the will, putting some
nebulous feeling in its place, and Baudouin certainly
seems at first reading at any rate to relegate it
to a very subordinate place in the hierarchy of
the mind.

Indeed, the impression that strikes one with dismay
in reading modern psychology as a whole, is that the
will seems to have disappeared. If so, it reduces

1 Cf. Kirk, Principles of Moral Theology, p. 257.
8 Op. cit., p. 125.

50

SUGGESTION AND WILL

human life to chaos. It is here that Baudouin and
many other writers raise such acute problems in
philosophy, and seem likely to lead one into a blind-
alley, in which the alleged facts of psychological
science come into an irreconcilable conflict with the
demands of ethics and religion. For it may be
roundly stated that any satisfactory conception of the
nature of human personality is impossible except in
terms of will. We cannot, in fact, if we are to speak
exactly, say, " I have a will " at all : the truth is
rather that I am a will. If, with Dr McDougall,
for example, we reduce what we call " will " to the
addition of the sentiment of positive self-feeling to
another experienced desire, we seem to have dissolved
the essential unity of conscious personal life alto-
gether. We are driven back to a kind of " atomism,"
such as we connect with David Hume. It is one
thing, and a necessary thing, to trace out the historic
development by which personality comes to be ;
it is quite another to make an adequate statement of
what personality now is.

And I cannot but hold that the strongest criticism
which must be brought against Baudouin concerns
the totally inadequate analysis that he has given to
the idea of will which recurs so frequently in his dis-
cussion. He seems to think of will as nothing more
than the inhibition of desire or the putting forth of
effort. It is true, of course, that in normal experi-
ence will is developed, and manifests itself, largely in
opposition to desire. But when we say " I will so-
and-so," we mean in fact, that this is the aim or
desire with which at the time I identify myself. We
also mean, as we shall see later on, that in our opinion,

5*

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

the thing can be done. 1 In other words, we mean
conscious purpose. And this, to judge from the
general line of his argument, is what Baudouin per-
haps really means. So that when on the one hand
he insists that suggestion must never be confused
with will, and on the other that the way of power is
to " superadd suggestion to the will," he means in
effect that suggestion is a process, carried out by
the unconscious, by which we can reinforce and
strengthen the effective achievement of our conscious
purposes. If so, the sharp distinction that he draws
between will and imagination, and the clearly
suggested primacy of the latter, concern a question
of psychological method, not philosophical inter-
pretation.

But, even so, I confess I do not feel satisfied. Even
on the psychological level, I confess to a scepticism
about his facts. We seem to need a more accurate
definition. How far does he know what he really
means by will ?

Let us leave our philosophical position, accord-
ing to which, as has been already stated, will means
personality in action, not a " part " of personality.
" Will," in this sense, is clearly the resultant of a
long series of choices or acts of will. Let us, then,
confine ourselves to the simpler issue a more
critical examination of what is really implied,
psychologically, in what we commonly call " an act
of will." How far is the " law of reversed effort "
really in accordance with the facts ?

We have seen that, according to Baudouin's treat-
ment, suggestion only works effectively on condition

1 William Brown, Suggestion and Mental Analysis, p. 127.

s*

SUGGESTION AND WILL

of not being confused with " will power." The
experiments, he says, do not prove that we have a
" strong will " : they prove the enormous power of
the unconscious. Conscious effort implies opposi-
tion : the moment we consciously make an " effort
of will," we call up at once into our minds a sugges-
tion, or idea, of difficulty, of some force militating
against success. This suggestion at once cancels out
the suggested notion of success, and so stultifies the
process. The only way to counter a wrong sugges-
tion is not by will, but by counter-suggestion. Thus
a man who says, " I will do my best, but I know it is
going to be very difficult, and it is doubtful if I can
succeed," is condemning himself to failure in advance.
This is, fundamentally, the meaning of the law of
Reversed Effort. But all things are possible to him
that believeth. And the man who deliberately
suggests to himself, " This bad habit is no longer my
master : I know that holiness is stronger than evil :
I am going to be able to get free of it," is going the
right way to ensure success. It is in this way that
suggestion " strengthens will."

That the will follows the imagination is one of
the most certain facts of experience. It is also
true that the training of character is largely
concerned with training imagination, and herein
lies some of the meaning of the prayer-life.

Now, these facts do seem to be rightly stated.
But Baudouin's statement of his " law " must
be held to be dangerously misleading. It is
true enough that over - anxiety, any kind of
strain or excessive effort, counteract the effects
of suggestion. If we make a great effort of

53

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

trying to go to sleep, we shall most certainly get
wider awake. But the conflict, in these cases which
he analyses, is not really between will and something
that is not will but imagination : it is between one
suggestion and another. The suggestion of sleep is
counteracted by the suggestion that one is going to
fail ; and the will is not defeated by imagination,
but is rather already nullified by being bound up
with a suggestion of failure. The effort of will is
" a special kind of will, a rather weak, fitful form of
will, because it carries with it fear of failure. [But]
the complete form of will is never in conflict with
suggestion. This will works, not through an effort
of determination, but with a calm assumption that,
of course, it is going to succeed." l

This amounts to saying that, as we had suspected,
Baudouin is merely handling will with a dictionary-
definition. He has not analysed what it really
implies. He is leaving out the intellectual factor
which is an essential part of real Volition. Pro-
fessor Stout's definition makes this clear : " Volition
is a desire qualified and refined by the judgment
that so far as in us lies, we shall bring about the
desired end because we desire it." 2 That is, there
is bound up with it the judgment that we can do
what we will to do. If we think we cannot, we do
not really will it. We may wish or desire it, but
it is not willed. Aristotle, as Dr Brown reminds us
in the passage from which I have already quoted,
discussed this point with the utmost clearness.
Will, he said, implies two factors the intellectual

1 W. Brown, op. cit., pp. 110-113.
8 Manual of Psychology, p. 711.

54

SUGGESTION AND WILL

and the appetitive. And we only will what we
believe to be in our own power. " We cannot will
what is impossible, and anyone who said he willed
things like that would be thought a fool. We can
wish for things that are impossible, immortality, for
instance. We can also wish for things which could
never be brought about by our own agency e.g.
that a certain athlete may win his race. But nobody
wills things of this kind only things which he
believes he can himself achieve. In a word, will
appears to be concerned with things which are in our
own power." *

Accepting this, we shall move to the conclusion
that it is very far from being the case that " imagina-
tion i* wins the victory. It would be very much
nearer the truth to say that what wins the victory
is completed/ will will which includes the belief
that it is in our power. It is in this way that the
faith-suggestion is rightly described as " reinforcing "
will. For without it, will lacks an essential factor.

This discussion has carried us a little further. But
something is still conspicuously lacking. We have
tried to give a more exact meaning to the word
" will " than Baudouin allows it. But the thing
itself is less simple than it sounds. It cannot be so
easily taken for granted. It is easy to understand
that ideally, as a matter of philosophical principle,
" will " really means the self in action, all our
faculties freely co-operating to attain a deliberately
chosen end. From this point of view we should all
of us admit, what we have to assume as a rough-and-
ready standard, that a man's acts reveal his essential

* Aristotle, Ethics, VL ii. 2 ; III. ii. 7-9,

55

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

cnaracter. His acts are his " character " in action.
But we all know that in the world of actual fact this
simple formula does not stand the test. The New
Psychology, by its researches into all that is meant by
the " unconscious motive," compels us to qualify
our statement even as a matter of pure theory. It
is plain that our law does not cover all the facts. A
man's choice may be determined by some mental or
emotional disturbance, by some trivial experience in
his own past, to such an extent that it cannot really
be called " his " act or " his " choice at all. He may
believe that it is his deliberate choice, whereas really
he was impelled to it by some buried and possibly
unconscious motive. We have looked at instances
of this already. On the other hand, he may disown
his act and declare that it is not really " his " at all.
" I chose that, but because I couldn't help it : it
was not I but sin dwelling in me " such is the sort
of account the man would give of it. In cases like
this, suggestion avails little.

A medical friend has pointed out to me that
Coup's methods are almost entirely concerned with
symptoms rather than with causes. It would be no
cure for measles, obviously, to apply ointment to
the spots ; nor would it be to " suggest " the spots
away. And anyone can think of many instances
where, for successful psycho-therapy, something
more than suggestion is required. For example,
some moral or emotional crisis may have caused a
patient acute indigestion, as well as its more direct
psychical consequences. Here it would not be much
use to suggest to the patient that he will be able to
enjoy his dinner. That will leave untouched the

SUGGESTION AND WILL

real cause of the trouble. There must first be a
process of analysis, revealing what is ultimately the
matter, before suggestion can be used successfully.

And this is even more obvious in the moral sphere. 1

A man's inability to believe that the thing he desires

or knows to be binding upon him can in fact be

achieved, may be due to some pathological cause.

Ill-treatment in his childhood may have left him

with an %c inferiority complex," so that " faith " is

scarcely possible until the cause has been analysed and

removed. Or, again, a formed evil habit may be the

result of abuse many years ago, and must be traced

back and dealt with at its source. Or his inability to

choose freely and cut himself loose from the fetters

of his past may be due to remorse or a sense of guilt

unforgiven. In these and many similar instances we

can see that the problem cuts down very much

deeper than the " law of reversed effort " would

admit. It is no good saying that a man is powerless

" so long as he thinks he is and no longer." The

point is that he just cannot think otherwise. In

other words, it ignores the whole difficulty if we say

suggestion can here reinforce the will. The man's

need is far more radical. Something has gone wrong

with the will itself. The " whole " will, the will

that is victorious, is only possible when that has

been cured. Something remedial has got to happen

in the very core of personality : the man has got to

1 The underlying cause of moral delinquency may no doubt often be
rather physiological than strictly psychological; e.g., it may be due to
excessive or deficient secretions in the endocrine glands, or to cerebral
injuries, and so on. Those who are interested in this aspect of the
question should consult such books as Dr Bernard Hollander's The
Psychology of Misconduct, or an excellent series of articles on juvenile
delinquency recently published in Psyche (1922).

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

become a changed man. In other words, we are
here brought face to face with the need for what
Religion calls " redemption."

Moreover, quite apart from Psychology, our own
most obvious experiences force us daily to the same
conclusion. We know that often we are quite un-
able to will what we know quite well we ought to
will. As the Bishop of Manchester has put the
position : " I can be good if I will but I won't. 75
The will cannot move itself. There is some disease
of impotence upon it. Our inner selves require to be
made whole. Or, again, there are none of us but
must admit that knowing perfectly well what the
right choice is, we quite deliberately choose the
wrong. This may sometimes be due, as we saw
just now, to a pathological condition which needs
mental analysis to cure it. But it may be due
to " inner cussedness," that is to which theology calls
" sin." This is a fact from which there is no escape.
And it means that while it is demonstrably true
that suggestion is a strangely potent instrument,
yet suggestion by itself is not enough. It costs more
than that to redeem men's souls. Some new thing
has to happen to ourselves.

It is fundamentally necessary to recognize this.
For it introduces a wide qualification into claims for
the omnipotence of " suggestion." The method
needs something far more radical, prior to or side by
side with it, before its best results can be achieved.
And this must be borne in mind later on when we
come to examine the methods of Jesus Christ. We
shall see Him frequently " suggesting " escape from
evil and disease, renewed power and recovered faith

SUGGESTION AND WILL

in God. But it surely is true that His suggestions
" work " just because they are His suggestions, that
is because He (or His living Spirit) penetrates
and changes the innermost heart of those people
whom He influences.

There is also the converse of what we have just
stated. Our " character," as we say, the men
we are, re largely if not entirely the resultant of
our constant and repeated acts of choice. The
whole of life is a series of alternatives ; choice con-
fronts us at every step of the way ; and according
as we choose, so are our characters. " Sow an act
and you reap a habit : sow a habit and you reap a
character." So that a life can reach its highest level
only by stern and continued loyalty, exercised in
our hourly, trivial choices, to the highest that we
know. I believe that this law held of Our Lbrd
Himself. I cannot believe that the Incarnation
can be stated in wholly metaphysical terms, as
though it made no demands upon Himself. His
life is stripped, for me, of half its glory unless there
was always away on the horizon at least the theo-
retical possibility of a choice which would be dis-
loyalty to God's will. The temptation-story would
have no real meaning unless there was there a
desperately hard choice, achieved by Him " with
strong crying and tears." He " through eternal
Spirit offered Himself without spot to God " : but
He lets us into the secret of what it cost Him.
" Ye are they," He said to the disciples, " who have
continued with Me in My temptations." The life
which perfectly embodied the Mind and Will of the
Eternal was a life of sustained and costly loyalty.

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

Now, of these choices which have to be made con-
tinually, many are chiefly concerned with suggestions.
We have to be constantly on our guard, constantly
training and exercising ourselves, to refuse the wrong
impulse and the wrong suggestion which would play
such havoc in our lives, and putting the counter-
suggestion in its place. The religious man knows
plainly enough, of course, that this is something far
too difficult to be done by his own unaided efforts.
It needs the " assistance " of the Holy Spirit. On
the other hand, he knows, equally clearly, that only
by such continued self-discipline can he open his
soul to the influence of the Spirit. And, unsatis-
factory though it may be as logic, I do not think
that the facts of life itself allow us to avoid this
" circular " statement.

It would thus be an entirely false conclusion to
argue, as many people do at present, that to recognize
the power of the unconscious and the tremendous
potency of suggestion, throws any doubt on the
primacy of the will. 1 The true conclusion is the
very opposite. And this is no mere academic point :
it is one of high practical importance. For it is
freely taught by enthusiasts that we need not worry
about training the will : we need not lament our
broken resolutions : all we need to do is to repeat our
formulas and enter by magic into the Kingdom of
Heaven. This is, in the highest degree, morally
dangerous : and it is dangerous because it is not
true. We may here pass over the absurdity involved
in stating that a deliberate resolve to suspend our

1 Cf. Tansley, p. 259: "Over the springs themselves, the most highly
developed mind and the most powerful will can have no control. 11

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SUGGESTION AND WILL

volitional activities is the same as to give up exer-
cising our wills, when in fact it is obviously an act
of will. (" I resolve to make no more resolutions.")
We need only observe that all we know of suggestion
throws a new and stronger emphasis on the function
of the will, and the need for trained habits and dis-
ciplined characters. The extent to which a sugges-
tion is accepted i.e. passes from hetero- to self-
suggestion depends upon the characters that we
are. Once the suggestion has been accepted, its
working appears to pass out of our own control.
But we can control oar suggestions at source.
According to our trained and conscious purpose, so
are the suggestions that we accept. We can by
" will," very largely, choose our interests : and our
vital energies flow along these channels. " Where
your treasure is, there will your heart be also," as
the Master said upon this very point. The sugges-
tions that, as we say, appeal to us, are those which
are in sympathy with our character the determined,
conscious purpose of our lives.

Thus success or failure in life, whether we attach to
those terms the highest or the lowest moral quality,
depend on training ourselves by stern self-discipline
to be suggestible to the right suggestions and im-
pervious to those that are inconsistent with them,
We shall try to show in a later chapter that the
religious life may be represented, in part, as a trained
openness of mind to those suggestions that may be
called " Divine," and resistance to those that may be
called " Satanic."

It is hardly possible to exaggerate the extent to
which our lives are vitiated by accepting deleterious

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

suggestions. Baudouin gives, as simple illustra-
tions, the familiar facts of " getting up tired/' of
" always having a headache on Mondays," of " feeling
sick when we sit with our back to the engine," and a
host of similar more or less trivial cases. 1 But it
cuts very deep. Nobody who has had any experience
of adolescents, indeed, we can almost say of adoles-
cence, can fail to recall instance after instance of the
way in which a pernicious moral habit has become a
task-master in mature life through a wrong sugges-
tion accepted from another in boyhood, or even in
unconscious infancy. The answer of the historic
Christian Church is, of course, the practice of infant-
baptism, whereby the growing life is exposed to the
influence of counter-suggestions from Christ and the
Christian society. He is transplanted, as the old
language would put it, from the kingdom of sin
into the kingdom of Grace. For Grace means just
the sum of those suggestions which God offers to
the human soul.*

It must be noticed that the path for most of us,
in our struggle for spiritual advance, is beset by
noxious suggestions. The way of victory is to
neutralize these dangers by a trained habit of will
and character formed and stable enough to reject
their influence, expel them, as it were, from our
system, and to welcome such suggestions as will help
us. The whole apparatus of " Catholic " devotion,
approved and tested by twenty centuries of profound
spiritual experience, is a magnificent attempt to
assist the formation of such habits, and to give a firm

1 See Pym, p. 34j$^, for further illustrations.

8 Webb, Problems in the Relation of God and Man, pp. 120-121.

62

SUGGESTION AND WILL

direction to the will. It certainly cannot be lightly
set aside. On the other hand, it must be realized
that the whole of it is, after all, but a means to an
end. The constant danger of institutional religion
is to make the means into an end in its own right, as
though the object of religious training were to train
a man to perform religious exercises. Obviously the
object of both of them is to train him to know and do
the will of God. So that if for any reason it should
be found that other means and other methods
achieve that end better than those which are custom-
ary, we are plainly free, and, indeed, bound to use
them. In everything connected with the Spirit, to
attempt to standardize it is to destroy. " To form
habits is to fail in life," unless we form them for some
further purpose. No doubt we need continual
reminder it is hard for religious people to believe it
that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for
the Sabbath. No doubt it is a temptation to the
clergy to talk to people as though " going to Church "
is the end for which they were made, so that they
worship religion rather than God. Some criticism
on this score may be deserved. Yet, when all this
has been said, it remains true that, faced as we are
with these tremendous forces pressing in upon us
from every side, the formation of religious habits is
of really primary importance in the pilgrimage
towards moral freedom. For saying our prayers
is like smoking, or writing home : if we drop the
habit, we lose the taste for it. And thereby we cut
ourselves off from the Source of Power, and expose
ourselves to demoralizing suggestions.
Here we reach the point where this discussion

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

passes over into that of a later lecture the bearing of
suggestion on the prayer-life. For may we not say,
in the language of psychology, that it is the work of
the Holy Spirit in us which disposes us to accept from
God good " suggestions " and make them our own,
so that they bring forth the harvest of the Spirit ?
The Easter collect seems to say as much : " Al-
mighty God ... we humbly beseech Thee that as
by Thy special grace preventing us Thou dost put
into our minds good desires, so by Thy continual help
we may bring the same to good effect."

We have now given, in the briefest summary, a
statement of a few of the leading theories with which
Psychology is to-day concerned. That was a neces-
sary preliminary. We can now pass to a task more
delicate though perhaps more interesting and re-
paying, and attempt to suggest how Christianity
partly anticipates and wholly satisfies the needs of
the soul as Psychology declares them.

CHAPTER IV.

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE RELIGIOUS LIFE.

So far, I have merely tried to give an unadorned
statement of the barest facts presented to us by
Psychology concerning the actual machinery of the
mind. There is nothing whatever new in what I
have written : it is simply reproduced from the best-
known books. It would be unwarrantable imper-
tinence to do otherwise than follow the experts.
My own contribution (such as it is) only begins now
that the facts are stated. For it goes without saying
that to know a little about the way in which our
minds do work cannot fail to be useful to everyone
of us in trying to make the best of our lives, and
to live in right relationship with God. It is also
obviously of prime importance to all clergy and
students for the Ministry who want to take seriously
the " cure of souls." Certainly, experience suggests
that to master the general principles of the subject
enables one to be of some slight use to some few
people in situations which would otherwise have
left one wholly baffled. We ought all of us surely
to know at least the elements of the science of the
mind as part of our professional equipment ; and
some of the things that are taught at theological
colleges might be spared, if necessary, to make room
for it.

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

In case any clergy should happen to read this
book, may I offer them here one or two remarks,
though their point is by no means confined to the
clergy; for all Christians are, in some degree,
responsible for other people's lives.

First, never let us look on people as " cases "
of such and such well-known law. God bates
mass-production : and if we ever think of men as
" cases," we can be sure we are losing touch with
God. The whole point of the psychological
approach is to reverence and understand the indivi-
dual. Secondly, never let us attempt to practise
what is known as psycho-analysis unless we have
first had as a preliminary a proper training in
it and in Psychology. Yet, having said that, it
needs no argument to show that if our main work
in the world is to bring the lives of men into touch
with God, and to bring the power of God into
men's lives, it is well to know how the human soul
is made, and to use God's power according to His
laws. What advice, for example, are we to give a
man who is in the throes of some violent moral
battle ? Obviously, he must use the power of God.
But if we say just that and nothing more, it leaves
him altogether in the air. It is our business to know
bow the Divine help can be obtained and the Power
applied to win the battle. We are apt to fall back
on vague references to prayer. But these, without
more exact definition, will not take the inquirer very
far : it is possible they may even do positive harm.
For prayer misdirected is spiritual poison. It is,
for example, accepted common-sense to tell a man
if great passion comes upon him he must try to fix

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PSYCHOLOGY AND THE RELIGIOUS LIFE

his mind on something else. To think of his tempta-
tion only strengthens it. But will it be really other-
wise with prayer if he concentrates his prayer on the
temptation. He may be only heaping wood on the
flames ! (On the other hand, to analyse the tempta-
tion, that is, to trace it back to its origin and so see it
in its right perspective, may often have the effect of
weakening it.) There really is a need for at least
some measure of psychological expertise for all who
dare to take upon themselves the responsibility of
being pastors. People who entrust us with their
confidence have a right to expect that we shall be
able to tell them how to open the channels of their
lives to the stream of Divine strength and purity.

No one can say anything that is worth saying about
" pastoral theology " without a very much more
mature experience than it is possible for me to claim.
I aim at nothing so pretentious. Yet it is in the
power of anyone who will read the Gospels eagerly
and without prejudice to see how the cardinal
teaching of Christianity fits in with the facts which
Psychology brings to light, and answers the needs of
the soul as we have analysed them. We will try, in
what follows, to watch the machinery by which
Our Lord worked in His earthly Ministry and His
religion works to-day. In other words, let us look at
the New Testament as students, for the time being,
of Psychology. But let me make clear that I am not
concerned in the present part of our discussion with
the theology of Christianity, as expressed for example
in the creeds, but only with the mental processes in
and through which the religion of Jesus works.

The problem of life for every one of us is the pro-

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

blem of how to become our true selves to live at
our highest level of power and usefulness in true
relationship with God. " Psycho-therapists/' said
Dr Crichton Miller to the Association of Head-
masters, " knew that in 19 out of 20 cases they
were dealing with the results of faulty upbringing.
Schoolmasters had to raise a new generation of
fathers who could be relied upon to give their
children spiritual freedom." 1 Christ came to give
men life, and life abundantly.

How can we become ourselves ?

To anyone who has not thought much about it
there may seem to be a certain absurdity in asking
how we are to become ourselves. It seems so obvious
to common-sense that whether for good or evil we
are what we are, and can never possibly become any-
thing else. Yet, on reflection, all of us know cases
in which a man has so completely changed that he is,
as we commonly say, quite a different man. In
whatever language we choose to describe the process,
" conversion " is a prime fact of experience. And if
we were pressed to explain what had really happened,
we should probably say that the man in question
supposing that the change was for the better had
at last begun to be his true self. We commonly say
to a naughty child when he or she has become " good
again," " Now, there's the real Charlie once more."
And, indeed, the whole aim of education to state
a contested question in a phrase is so to train and
stabilize personality as to help children to become
themselves ; in other words, to give them moral
freedom. For freedom plainly cannot mean capri-

1 Morning Post, Jan. 6, 1921.
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PSYCHOLOGY AND THE RELIGIOUS LIFE

ciousness : it means true and genuine self-expression,
a trained habit of virtuous character. The point is
well put in G. K. Chesterton's parable of the man
who set out on a voyage of exploration to discover a
new and more romantic Brighton beyond the setting
of the stars, and when he had found it landed at
Brighton pier. The land is ours all the time, but all
of us have to discover and conquer it before we can
enter into our inheritance. So, when we speak of
" conquering ourselves," we mean entering by con-
quest a land which was always ours, but is not yet
won. This is the story of our moral lives. Self-
hood is certainly the birthright of all the sons of
God : but it is something we must win by effort.
We can also sell it for a mess of pottage. " A true
self is something to be made and won, to be held
together with pains and labour, not something given
to be enjoyed " (Bosanquet).

Now, as is clear from what we have seen already,
our lives are only in the true sense free^ we only
become our real selves, when our lives are truly
unified. How does Christianity achieve this for us ?

Psychology and Philosophy agree that in the end
the only unity of which spiritual life is capable is
the unity of purpose. Life is one when every
element in it expresses one coherent purpose, great
enough to call out all our powers, to give free play to
all our faculties, and to unite them all in a single
loyalty in one harmonious and compelling aim.
The New Testament contains a classic instance of
how such unity was in fact achieved under the
influence of Christianity in the famous fragment of
Autobiography given us by St Paul in " Romans." In

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

Chapter VII. he reveals the secret of a life which
attained to an effectiveness which seems to us,
looking back on it, more than human. His be-
wildering versatility scholar, mystic, explorer, ad-
ministrator his tireless energy and terrific moral
power, dazzle us still as we read the record of them.
But it had not always been so with him. There had
been, in the past, the familiar story of the baffled
will and the divided aim, his whole life fragmentary
and torn in pieces, the house of his soul divided
against itself. He has given us an unsurpassed
picture of the loss of power and moral paralysis
which this conflict in his soul entailed. " The good
is present with me, but how to carry it out I do
not know. The good that I will that do I not, the
evil that I do not will, I do." It went to the length
of a " dissociation," like some of the cases of hysteria
which we have already noticed. His personality
was so disintegrated that some of the lower elements
of the self seemed to him an alien and demonic
power " sin " dwelling in him and possessing him.
The change came with the discovery that the
Crucified Messiah wanted him. From that moment
everything was different. " Who shall deliver me
from this body of death ? I thank my God through
Jesus Christ." His life was now restored to unity.
It was not only that he was in the conventional
religious sense " converted " : he became free and
acquired more power than any he had ever known
before. Henceforth his acts and motives were his
own : that is to say, he had become himself. For
now his thoughts and will and his desires were har-
nessed to and expressed a new purpose, co-ordinating

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PSYCHOLOGY AND THE RELIGIOUS LIFE

and controlling and bringing into an irresistible
harmony every faculty within him the love of
Christ which (as he says) " constrained " him. In
that servitude he found his freedom.

What we see here is a real " conversion," in the
sense that his life received a new centre. The self-
centred life is always chaos, as Our Lord seems never
to have tired of saying. When a life is God-centred
it is unified, and indeed, as we shall see later on, only
so far as they are God-centred can our lives be truly
called our own. Here let us note the psychological
fact, leaving the philosophy aside at present. Self-
committal to one God, that is practical monotheism,
is a psychological necessity for any soul that would
attain to self-hood. Mr Studdert Kennedy has
lately put this in his own characteristic way. 1 But
it lies deep down in the core of Our Lord's teaching
that nobody can serve two masters. In that brief
and haunting sentence He laid bare half the pro-
blems of psychology. And it is not hard, if we look
at the best-known records, to trace the ways in
which, in His life and teaching, He helped men and
women to spiritual freedom. We may quote a few
instances out of very many to serve as guides to any
who may wish to make this a matter of study for
themselves.

i. We must face our Discords.

It is plain enough from the Gospels that Our
Lord was continually in one form or another forcing
people up to decisions. He made of those who

1 Food for the Fed-up, pp. 11-18.

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

asked Him for advice more inexorable demands than
ever teacher has made before or since. " Unless a
man is ready to say good-bye to all that he has, he
cannot be My disciple." " I am not come into the
world/ 3 He said, " to bring peace, but division."
" Unto separation (/c/>iW) have I come into the
world " that is to say, people have got to choose :
they must be wholly for Him, or against Him.
Because a half-hearted discipleship that is always
looking regretfully over its shoulder at the past
would be a life of conflict and paralysis, ineffective
and unhappy, not filled with power and joy, as He
intended. " Remember Lot's wife " the type for
all of us of the conflict of desires unresolved. He
would not have Mr Facing-both-ways. A man who
starts with the plough and then looks back " is not
suited for the Kingdom of God."

Here we have partly, at least, the explanation of
His frequent and quite relentless emphasis on the
need for heroic renunciation. A man who wanted
to " enter into Life " was told to sell all that he had
and cut himself free. We must be ready to part
with all we have in order to buy the pearl of greatest
price. No price is too great to pay for the treasure
of inward peace and liberty. For the fullest self-
expression the abundant life which He came to
give to men demands readiness to self-mutilation.
In order to enter upon true life men must pluck out
an eye or chop off a hand. Anything that is truly
incompatible with the purpose with which we
identify ourselves, must be sacrificed unsparingly*
He even went sometimes to the length of saying
that men must baU their father and their mother,

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PSYCHOLOGY AND THE RELIGIOUS LIFE

the things that good men hold most dear and sacred
in comparison with God. For so long as there is
anything at all which we love for its own sake, and
apart from God, we are falling short of that " first
and great commandment," which is the secret of all
power and freedom. There must be that absolute
detachment, that moving away from all things of
lesser worth (however high their value in them-
selves) to find satisfaction only in God Himself
before we can say that we do indeed love God.
For " your wills will follow the things you care for
most." We cannot be satisfied till we are able
to say:

" Whom have I in heaven but Thee ?

There is none upon earth that I desire in comparison
of Thee/'

But then, when the soul has made its renunciation,
when all we have and are is consecrated to the one
Master-light of all our seeing, we can (as it were)
come down the ladder again, seeing all things in the
light of God and rejoicing in all that is lovely, true
and beautiful.

There is, very likely, a reminiscence of Plato in the
interpretation I have suggested. But it is, I hope,
nevertheless not untrue to the Master's mind. For
it was He, for whom life meant obedience, who kept
back nothing of the tremendous price, who most
rejoiced in the world in which He lived and was
most keenly conscious of its goodness. Only those
who can will Calvary can talk as Jesus did about the
lilies. And St Francis, who sacrificed even his self-
respect, thought of his Brothers Minor as " God's

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

merry-men." For joy is the music of spiritual
harmony.

2. We must Lose Ourselves in order
to Find Ourselves.

The arresting note in Our Lord's proclamation of
the secret of inner peace and harmony is its startling
objectivity. Religion, no doubt, would have been
for Him unmeaning except as personal communion
with God. Like the prophets, He protests in the
name of the mystic inwardness of religion against a
mechanical outward Institutionalism. Yet there is
no trace in His recorded sayings that He would have
been very much in sympathy with our modern
emphasis on " religious experience." Indeed, the
nearest approach to a definition of His conception of
Religion is that it is doing the will of God. He would
have us look steadily outwards and not inwards
towards God and God's other children, not within
at our own religious states. We only find our lives,
He was ever insisting, by forgetting all about our-
selves and losing self in devotion to the cause. The
self-centred life is never unified : it is ever fightings
without and fears within. It is in identifying self
with a purpose greater than our own, in staking life
and our soul's destiny on a spiritual allegiance, in
" cancelling " self altogether, that we " find " the
selves that we are meant to be. Thus the condition
of " entering into life," in its fullest and most
pregnant sense, is readiness to throw our souls away.
Unless there are things which a man values more
than the preservation of his own existence, in whose

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PSYCHOLOGY AND THE RELIGIOUS LIFE

service he will count himself as nothing, he can never
realize his possibilities or find the meaning of life,
which is life in God.

Thus those who would follow in His way of life
must cease to think about themselves : they must
take their lives in their hands day by day, committed
body and soul to the adventure " venturing neck or
nothing, Heaven's success found or earth's failure "
losing themselves in the service of the Kingdom.
These are the terms on which they will find their
souls. Such is His doctrine of self-realization as far
removed from the prudential motives too often
inculcated by the churches as from the barbarous
notion of " self-expression," based on a caricature of
modern psychology, which is often taught now as the
new ethic. Nietzsche repudiated a philosophy on
which was built the ethic he disliked. That was
an honest and justifiable course. The current
teaching about " self-realization " avoids the trouble
of thinking what it means by vague references to the
New Psychology, the teaching of which if people
would only read it points in the very opposite
direction that he who is most concerned about
himself is the man who most defeats his own object.
And it is, after all, but plain common-sense that a man
is most healthy and his life most free, when he is
(as our phrase runs) " taken out of himself," absorbed
in an interest or work which draws out his best power
in its service. It is, indeed, the severest condemna-
tion of the present organization of society, that
vocation is a luxury which only the wealthy can
afford. The vast majority of men and women must
accept the first job that is offered them. Few can

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really be said to be occupied in work which is
fundamentally worth doing, or in which they can
truly lose themselves. Almost all observers are
agreed that much of the current unrest and nervous
strain, and of the crude demand for self-expression
(in the sense in which it can never be obtained) are
traceable in great part to this cause.

This cardinal doctrine of " dying to live," which
lies so near the heart of the preaching of Jesus, is in
full accord with the teaching of psychology. But,
while psychology analyses the need, Jesus offers us
the answer. For He provides us with the Purpose
which demands of us all we have to give and restores
to us ourselves in return. Not every " interest "
will guarantee the finding of our real personalities.
It is possible to gain the whole world " and lose or
pay the price of yourself for it." It must be a
purpose embedded in Reality, an expression of the
Will that made us persons, so that if we merge our
own lives in it we shall find the meaning of what we
are becoming. Such was what Jesus called the
Kingdom of God. That is the all-embracing end
of spiritual striving and endeavour, in which all our
scattered interests and our fragmentary aspirations
find their completion and fulfilment. There is
nothing good that is outside the Kingdom. To
lay down life for the Kingdom's sake is to find it.
If we live for the Kingdom we can become ourselves.

For, whether consciously or unconsciously, we all
to some extent live double lives. We are torn be-
tween conflicting aims, competing claims, un-
harmonized desires. But to live for the Kingdom
unifies our lives. It demands an undivided alle-

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE RELIGIOUS LIFE

giance in which there is no possibility of conflict.
For he that wills the Kingdom wills all good. It
is the supreme end of all endeavour, in which all
human hopes and aspirations, all that man is and all
that he inherits the Kingdom and the power and
the glory are conserved and guaranteed in God.
There is the motive that can make us whole. " Do
not be of doubtful mind" He said, " but make God's
Kingdom the centre of your aim, and all these other
things shall be added to you."

Yet it is one thing to know the true aim of life, and
quite another to steer ourselves towards it. Know-
ledge, unfortunately, is not virtue : and will by
itself cannot set our powers in motion. The
driving-power of life is emotion : the function of
knowledge and choice is to guide it. Thus it needs
something with some passion in it, something which
makes a strong appeal to us, to make us hate the evil
and choose the good. And it is the " constraining "
power of Our Lord Himself, the response of the
heart to His personal appeal, which can lead us to
serve the Kingdom He proclaimed. No teaching of
the Christian way of life can in the end grip men's
desires and wills unless the Teacher Himself is in the
centre. To yield to Him is to become ourselves.

Recall, at this point, what was said in a previous
lecture about the harmonizing of our " complexes."
When a man is passionately in love, the strong
emotional associations which centre round the person
of his beloved tend to draw all other associations
into that one whole of thought and desire. He
thinks in terms of her about everything : any chance
event or incident becomes charged with his ruling

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passion and tends to recall her to his thoughts :
wherever he goes, however he is occupied, she is
always present to his mind and supplies the motive
of everything he does. In a perfectly literal sense
she fills his mind. He thinks and wills and desires
nothing which is not controlled by his dominant
interest. He loses himself in another. So it is
when in any real sense a disciple has fallen in love
with the Master. All his various associations, each
with their own motives and activities, will tend more
and more to be taken up and unified in that one all-
pervading loyalty. He will take his life in his hand
and follow. And because, as Christians hold, that
Master is the revelation of the soul of the world,
his life will be completed and made his own in
growing correspondence and accord with the Will
that rules the Universe. He has found the truth,
and the truth will set him free.

3. "Jesus and Human Personality.

The first and most important practical lesson
which is to be learned from the New Psychology is
increased respect for individuality. With its applica-
tion to educational practice, the old barbarous
methods of mass-production and standardized ex-
ternal discipline are being rapidly transformed.
The " average boy " is already obsolete, and attempts
are being made in all directions so to remodel the
educational system as to help the child to become
himself, rather than (as of old) to impose upon him
ideas, habits, and a code of morals which other
people regarded as good for him. It is much to be

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hoped that the method used in Church will soon
catch up with the method used in school. For there
is no aspect of our subject where psychology is more
emphatically forcing us back to the outlook of Our
Lord. His respect for human personality the
corollary of His certainty of God was the founda-
tion of His approach to men. It would have been
easy for Him to dominate : it was very hard for Him
to abstain from doing so that was part of the
struggle in the wilderness. He decided then" that
He would go to men taking nothing in His hands save
the gift of spiritual freedom. He would have no
kingdom of " enlightened despotism/' even though
His Father's will were ruler in it ; He would have
no forcing of men's loyalty by the massive weight of
supernaturalism. The Kingdom of God should be
" in their hearts " : He would call men to the
adventure of being themselves. So he took them
freedom and they were afraid of it, as His Church
has been afraid of it ever since. The forces of
reaction and materialism and all upholders of
government " from above " were perfectly right in
their terrified recognition that He was the greatest
danger that ever had threatened them. And it is
as true now as it was at the Crucifixion. Where the
Spirit of Jesus is, there is liberty.

But it is extraordinarily difficult for religious
teachers to learn His mind on this point. We like
to quote His own biting comment to tyrannize
over other people and so to be called their bene-
factors ! We are always apt to approve of docile
people : but we ought to regard them as our worst
failures. Jesus criticized the clergy of the Church

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of which He was a devoted member because they
" bound heavy burdens grievous to be borne " on
the shoulders of their congregations, trying to
force a uniform rule and standard of religious life
and practice on them all. He claimed for Himself
a new method in religious education. He invited
men to enter a new school and take the " yoke " of a
new teaching on them. " My yoke is easy and my
burden is light." For He would bring them into
touch with God, the God of Abraham and Isaac,
to whom personality is dear, so that in communion
with the Father they might freely become what they
were meant to be.

The whole method of His Ministry is individual
through and through. He showed a scrupulous,
almost religious reverence for the individual con-
stitution. Persons (He taught) are supremely valu-
able. A man is better than a sheep : he is better
than the Sabbath day. Persons must not be
sacrificed to things, nor to the demands of Institu-
tionalism. His teaching aimed at challenging dull
minds and awakening in them the search for truth,
rather than at imparting information. His cures
were cures of patients, not of diseases. In every
case there was a different method. His counsel and
advice to those who sought it in their moral and
spiritual difficulties was advice to Simon or to
Thomas, not moral theology stated in general terms.
Indeed, it is often fairly possible to reconstruct the
personal history of those who pass across the Gospel
story by studying the way in which He treated them ;
and that is the best way of learning the " cure of
souls." We are drifting away altogether from His

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method if we allow ourselves to attempt to make
people what we think they ought to be. The
question is, What does God want them to become ?
To produce a " type " in a church or a school or
college is the condemnation of its system. For
nobody who has become (in the words of Jesus) a
student in the school of the Kingdom of God will
try to do what God never does, and impose an idea
or a method of life or worship however true or
useful it may be on the soul of another person.
This reverence for personality must be the founda-
tion of all true education. (But note what has to be
said on the other side Chap. VI. below.)

And the Kingdom of God which Jesus came to
proclaim is rooted in God's personality and the
uniqueness of individual persons. Jesus gave to the
old expectations about the Kingdom \vhich was to
come a definitely personal interpretation. " It all
depends on the soil. It is best illustrated by the
merchant, or the seeker after buried treasure. Like
a net, it is flung wide round all sorts of people. " In
all cases, He seems to stress the personal factor.
And, in the end, we can attach no meaning to the
consummation of God's Kingdom short of the
perfected and complete communion of all persons
with the love of God, and thereby with one another.
It is somewhere near Augustine's wonderful phrase :
" The most perfectly harmonious and organized
society enjoying God and one another in God." l

This respect for personal freedom and develop-
ment was learnt by the greatest of His disciples. It

1 Concordatissima et ordinatissima societas fruendi Deo et invicem
in Deo.

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

must have been difficult for St Paul, with his ardent
nature and his gift for organizing. But nowhere is
his greatness seen more brilliantly than in his
deliberate refusal to standardize the churches which
he founded, or the individuals composing them.
" As every man has been called, so let him abide."
It needed, he knew, the unique contribution which
each man makes simply by being himself (reflecting
in that mirror the glory of God) to " form Christ "
in the human race. The Church has not always
been so wise as this, nor her teachers always so wise
as the Church herself. But when Christian in-
spiration was at its height, it is hard to trace any sign
of the belief that uniformity is desirable.

Thus the conclusion of this psychology, leading us
to a fresh eagerness to study and respect the indivi-
dual, lead us back to the methods of the Gospels.
And the teaching and practice of Our Lord, and of
those who " had His mind " in the early Church,
may now be understood with added clearness to
inspire and (if need be) redirect our methods. The
result should be not only an added freshness and
spontaneity in the Church's life, but also a wider
range of catholicity.

4. Guilt and Forgiveness.

There are many obstacles to power and freedom
which have to be passed on the journey towards self-
hood, but few so difficult as the sense of guilt. Few
things so disintegrate our lives (by repression and
dissociation), and so paralyse our effort for the future
as self-reproach and remorse about the past. All
psychologists would agree in this, even if they should

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hold, as those must hold who adopt a thorough-
going determinism, that the sense of guilt is itself
a delusion of which psychological treatment can
relieve us. Delusion or not, the sense of guilt is a
fact of universal human experience ; and all religions
above the primitive level have ever sought for ways
of release from it, as the condition of effective
living. It was by a profound intuition into the
deepest needs of human life, as well as under-
standing of God's character, that the saints and
spiritual experts have always insisted on penitence
and pardon as the preliminaries of moral progress.
We can see now the soundness of their psychology.
For not only is the sense of guilt the great disturber
of our inner peace, but also, by the laws of sugges-
tion, the memory of wrong-doing haunting the
mind is itself a temptation to repeat it. Thus sin
which we believe to be unforgiven is a potent cause
of temptation. So that the belief that one can be
forgiven, however that belief may be acquired and on
whatever grounds it may be accepted, is itself of
first-rate psychological importance. As remorse must
paralyse our moral energies, so the belief that we have
been forgiven (if such a belief can in any way be
won) will be one of the chief ways of setting us free.
There is no doubt that to tell someone else about
the repressed secret which is haunting us will itself
be one of the ways of setting us free. To dig up the
hidden complex so that the patient is no longer
haunted by it, is often enough to restore his life to
unity. In line with the modern methods of psycho-
logists is the old religious practice of confession.
It is older by far, of course, than Christianity, and

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was widely taught in the Hellenistic world* Indeed,
it is possible to risk a guess whether some of the
priests of Asklepios and of some forms of the Mystery-
worships, as well as the professors of Philosophy,
who were in effect spiritual directors, may not have
stumbled upon some of the secrets of what we now
call psycho-analysis. In any case, confession was a
practice recommended by the healers of soul and
body widely and long before Christianity came. The
Church very wisely took it over, like everything else
that was good in the older culture.

Confession to God seems to have played a part in
nearly all known forms of Religion. The sense of
release which it brings the penitent is an undeniable
fact of experience. " Confession to men " which
so many people vilify is an equally common and
liberating process. There can be no fireside conse-
crated to true friendship where confessions are not
sympathetically heard. There is nothing disputable
about these two cases. But the Christian religion,
in its historic forms, has offered a combination of the
two. It has taught men to confess their sins to
God either openly before the congregation or
privately " in the presence of a priest." The peni-
tent thus seeks both forgiveness from God (and, in
the former case, from his fellow-Christians) and also
the help and advice of a human friend. Many
people find this unnecessary : they can approach
God immediately and receive the certainty of His
forgiveness. But it seems to me a plain matter of
experience (quite apart from any ecclesiastical
" views ") that many people in many circumstances
do gain from confession " in the presence of a

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priest " a sense of liberation and release which is not
guaranteed for them by other methods. It may
be possibly that the human touch opens for them
avenues to God. Or it may be that the greater
effort involved in so searching a test of sincerity
leaves behind it a clearer sense of freedom. What-
ever the reason, the fact is, I think, undoubted.
This sacramental form of confession is ceasing at
last to be a party issue ; and people of all schools of
thought have recourse to it, to their great relief.
It is often obviously of the highest value. We may
well rejoice that people are not deterred by the
ties of outworn party-loyalties from a practice which
has proved itself so valuable.

But two things need to be constantly remembered:
(i) Such confession is a " treatment " : it is not a
regular regimen for life. Castor-oil may save a
man's life at times ; but it would not be found
very nourishing as a daily substitute for breakfast-
coffee. Personally, I stand out for confession. I
refused to be terrorized by party-slogans from a God-
given method of spiritual help. But a dominant
school in the English Church to-day seems to me
to be seriously in danger of turning a real and
sacred means of grace into a mechanical kind of
fetish. To teach the necessity of frequent con-
fession as a primary part of Christian duty would
appear to be psychologically unsound. It serves
to defeat its own object. 1 It reminds one of the old-

1 But there is an excellent resum by Dr Hadfield of the difference
between confession and psycho-analysis, and the need for occasional
repetition of the former (the latter being a "radical cure"), quoted in
Kirk, Principles of Moral Theology \ Preface, p. xvii., footnote; see also
, p. 161, note.

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fashioned type of nursemaid who used to administer
" doses " once a week, regardless of whether or no
the child needed them. And the child grew up with
a weakened constitution. But the object of any
spiritual adviser, whether friend, psychologist or
priest, should surely be to make himself unnecessary.

(2) In so far as advice (or " counsel ") is offered by
the confessor to the penitent and without it much
of the value must be lost we must recognize the
imperative necessity of psychological training for the
priest, lest he do positive harm to those he serves.
" It is a hard thing to be good," said Aristotle
and harder still to help other people. It is also prob-
able that there are cases where only the specialist
has skill to help. There are certainly cases where
the priest must be humble enough to pass his task on
to the trained psycho-analyst.

But, plainly, if a man haunted by remorse has
recourse to confession to obtain relief, what he wants
is not merely good advice. He wants to know that
he has been forgiven. There are cases, of course,
where the sense of guilt is delusory. A man may
bitterly reproach himself for something that is not
really " sin " at all. What he chiefly needs then is
enlightenment, whether physiological or psycho-
logical. There are cases, too, in which a sense of
remorse may not be a consciousness of guilt at all ;
it may be a strange pathological domination by
some repressed complex from the past. Here, too,
the chief need is again enlightenment ; though it
frequently costs a searching process of faithful
analysis before it can be had. Yet if a man is
oppressed by a sense of guilt which really is guilt

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in the court of conscience, then it is Christian for-
giveness which can best set free his moral energies.
Guilt is the great represser of psychic freedom.
First because, from the religious standpoint, it puts
us out of right relations with the Divine source of
Power. Secondly because, on psychological grounds,
it leads to conflict and repression, and all the waste
of power which this involves. To be forgiven, and
know it, is to be set free. So it was that in dealing
with physical sickness Jesus began by the promise of
forgiveness.

It is Jesus who can bring us this release. For He
brings near to us a forgiving God of whose forgive-
ness we may be assured by the gift of fresh oppor-
tunities of service. For Psychology here agrees with
Christianity that deliverance or redemption is com-
pleted by losing ourselves again in eager service,
rather than by a merely passive experience or a
transaction performed outside ourselves.

5. Christianity and Instinct.

In Chapter I. we saw how fundamental are the
Primary Instincts in our constitution. We have
also discussed the teaching of psychology about
their redirection or sublimation. Broadly, and on
the whole, it is plainly true that Christianity agrees
with the attitude of the psychologists. And this is
true, I believe, of no other religion to anything like
the same extent. Stoicism, for instance, when con-
fronted with the impulses of our physical nature,
says, in effect, Pretend they are not there. Some of
the great religions of the East regard them as evil in

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themselves, to be eradicated or sloughed off by the
soul in its purgation. Yet human experience
certainly corroborates the scientific conclusion of
psychologists. The attempt to eradicate the " de-
sires of the flesh " stimulates all the temptations of
St Anthony. Christianity agrees. It is true that
there have been, from time to time, outbreaks of
exaggerated asceticism : but these are quite off the
line of the true tradition. The Christian attitude
to our animal instincts is that they are not evil in
themselves, but potentially instruments of the
Spirit of God. What matters is the end for which
we use them. Sin, as the theologians would put
it, lies not in the instinct but in its perversion.
Obviously, a religion which is founded on an
Incarnation in the flesh cannot possibly say any-
thing else.

If the body is the " Temple of the Spirit," then it
must follow that our instincts are made by God for
God, to become the instruments of His Spirit. And
ultimately all our hardest problems in the practice
of religion, considered from their human side, are
grouped round the problems of our instincts. We
talk, rather loosely, about the " religious instinct " ;
but in truth it seems to be the case that there is not
any such specific instinct. Religion is not one
activity : it is life transformed and redirected. It
is true that man is " incurably religious " ; but the
great religious conations and emotions seem to be
compounded and built up out of those connected
with the primary instincts love, awe, curiosity,
etc.' as they react to the slowly perceived stimulus
of the spiritual factor in environment. Our religious

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE RELIGIOUS LIFE

life, too, has evolved out of the simplest modes of
reflex action, as with gradually developing con-
sciousness man has become increasingly aware of
the Reality which encompasses him " in Whom he
lives and moves and has his being. 5 ' Thus the very
existence of religion and the ineradicable hunger for
it which endures through all our passing generations
is itself the best and most notable example of the
" sublimation " of our instincts by influences that
derive from a higher Order. This suggestibility to
the Unseen has now become part of our racial
inheritance. We have only to note now how this
redirection of a baffled or perverted instinct in the
case of any given individual can be achieved by
Christianity.

It is striking to notice, in the Synoptic records,
how seldom Jesus is found denouncing sin. He is
hardly ever saying " Don't do it " : there are no
negations in His teaching. His whole concern is to
show the way and the life for which mankind in
the knowledge of God is made, and to point men to
its unbounded possibilities. He was offering men
the " life of the world to come." We are just
beginning now to rediscover this cardinal point in
His psychology. Negative teaching or negative
prayer is useless. It is not really likely to help much
if we tell a selfish child not to be selfish. We need
to show him bigger things to live for. In the same
way, following the laws which we have discussed in
the chapter on Suggestion, we shall see that it will
not greatly avail a man to pray against a temptation
that assails him. He should pray for the good which
is its opposite, that his feelings and desires may

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

stream towards it. The positive goodness is what
he should emphasize in his prayer, and in his whole
endeavour. All of us would, presumably, agree
with this. But we have to remember that this is
the right method of dealing with all the great primary
instincts of the herd, of sex, of pugnacity, etc,
which cause such havoc in life till they are tamed.
They, too, have to be trained to find their outlet
in the service of the Master and His Kingdom.

Perhaps in different forms the herd instinct lies
at the root of two-thirds of our moral troubles.
" Evil communications corrupt good manners "
as the A.V. curiously translates it : group-claims
come into violent collision. The " gang-spirit/'
for example, which supplies the impulse for so much
juvenile crime, is but one manifestation of this
instinct. But the boy who " knows a better " gang
will " go to it " : and there is the obvious clue for
dealing with him. This particular example is every-
where recognized and admitted now : and it con-
tains the whole essential principle. In most spheres
of life, common-sense and accumulated experience
have combined to reach the true conclusion, and to
put into practice the right methods. But we still
hesitate unwarrantably to extend it into the domain
of sex, and it seems that some elementary discussion
of this matter should be attempted here. For
while it is an entire misrepresentation to suggest
that the New Psychology is " all about sex," yet it
is the fact that for almost every man the battle for
self-control and purity is the sternest fact in his
moral experience. It is here that a scientific out-
look and a true and sane principle of teaching are

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imperatively necessary. The central point has been
already emphasized. It is not the slightest use to
be merely negative. " Self-control " is an impossi-
bility except as an aspect of self-realization. If,
then, we seek to cure ourselves or others of some form
or other of sexual irregularity, we must remember
that we are dealing with the perversion of an instinct.
A good instinct has " gone wrong. 55 Thus we must
start from the stage further back, and direct the
instinct which brings the trouble to us into another
and legitimate channel. That is the only possible
way to " fight " it.

Let us see how this can be stated in Christian
terms.

We should start, there is little doubt, from the
frank admission that what for psychology is the
" sex-instinct " is for us the creative love of God
a delegated power of creation, to be used for ends
in accordance with His will. For the purity of the
Christian ideal is not the cold impassive " modera-
tion " of Aristotle or the Stoics, but a passionate and
active loyalty, a life dedicated to Christ-like energies.
The love-energy, like all others, is to be consecrated
to our Lord, and redirected in His service. Now
this impulse is creative power : it is, in fact, the only
power we have for creative work of any kind. And
the gifts which have been entrusted to us are not
(we are told) to be laid up in a napkin, but to be
employed constructively. Thus it is as disloyal in
religion as it is unsound in psychology to let our
creative energies run to waste, or even to remain
unrealized. They have got to be always used for
creating something. We have, then, here, the

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Christian parallel to the axiom of the psycho-
analyst, that mental and spiritual health demands
the fullest possible measure of self-expression. The
libido^ that is to say, the vital impulse, the " drive "
or onward march of personality, which is the force
that operates in instinct, must be ever setting
towards new " interests," so that the psychic life
may not stagnate but realize itself in increasing
fullness. When for any reason the libido is dammed,
the stream of psychic life is poisoned. The ethical
appeal of Christianity coincides in a most remarkable
way with the result of medical inquiry. Only it
is far more interested in the fullest expression of
loyalty to Christ than in a mere avoidance of
" neurosis." The instinct of sex, we say, is given to
us by God for creative purposes. And such of its
energy as cannot be used for creating other personali-
ties must not be wasted in gross self-indulgence : it
has got to be used for creating other things, to the
glory of God.

Thus we shall seek with every kind of resourceful-
ness new outlets for this vital impulse. It can flow
along the lines of other instincts, the parental, for
example, or the combative expressing itself in
running a troop of scouts or in fighting against some
flagrant social wrong. These or a hundred other
different interests, inspired by devotion to the
Master, and consecrated to His service, supply the
ideal " new affection " leading us to express our-
selves creatively to the glory of God and the relief
of man's estate. And I do not feel the slightest
hesitation in claiming that in principle and essence
this was the method adopted by Our Lord.

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His attitude can be even more clearly seen in the
example of another instinct very closely connected
with that of sex the fighting instinct of pugnacity.
It is, perhaps, the most violently destructive and
anti-social of all our impulses. The moral training
of youth is chiefly concerned with the discipline and
control of its activities. For the first great lesson
learned Ly the small boy in the earlier stages of his
education is, as Mr Kipling has expressed it, " to
keep his mouth shut and his pores open." Gradually
he finds his fighting instinct transferred to the
service of his house, his school, his college, his
family, his country. The individual is " socialized "
by training this instinct in a new direction. And
Dr McDougall has shown, in The Group Mind, how
in the evolution of society, this inherently disruptive
force has become a stabilizing and binding influence.
But the world has just learnt in a frightful war
that the instinct is still ruinously active. It has been
transferred from the individual to the service of the
group : it is not yet trained to be anything but
destructive. The smallest pretext will provoke a
war. For at present no " end " is commonly
recognized with an appeal sufficiently tremendous
to draw off this most dangerous of instincts into
constructive, peaceful enterprises.

But again Christianity supplies the need. It
offers the adventure of the Kingdom. Our Lord
loved " fighters." He frequently suggested that
it was this kind of temperament of which His
Kingdom specially stands in need. " The Kingdom
of Heaven suffers violence and violent men take it
by force," He said. He chose a Sinn Feiner

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Simon the Zealot to be of the inner circle of the
Twelve. He brought into the world a new ideal
and offered people an adventurous service. He
sought to enlist them in His great Crusade. He
appealed to all that in men is heroic. There must
be no looking back, He said. There must be no
prudential calculation. It is an adventure that may
cost your life and only those who are ready for that
must follow. And all through history thousands of
men and women have taken service under Him as
" Captain," sublimating their combative impulses
in perilous enterprises and dauntless loyalty for the
sake of the Kingdom which is to come. This is the
record of martyrs and pioneers in all branches of the
Master's army.

Only the Kingdom of God is great enough and
exacting enough in its demands to supply the " moral
equivalent for war." And on that civilization
to-day depends. Mr H. G. Wells' book God the
Invisible King will be still gratefully remembered ;
and it is in the true spirit of Christ's teaching that
Dr McDougall finds the substitute for international
war in a rivalry in serving and developing backward
peoples.

So it can be with the creative instinct. It, too,
can be enlisted for the Kingdom. For the Kingdom
of God as we have seen already embraces every
form of human good. There is nothing good which
is outside the Kingdom : it means the perfection of
God realized on earth. In its service we are called
to spend all that we have it in us to become, all that
we have the power of creating. In the cause of the
Kingdom that tumultuous stream which surges

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irresistibly through our nature, overflowing all the
dams and sluices and impregnating the whole of our
psychic life, can spend itself constructively and
divinely.

How, then, shall all this be applied to ourselves,
or to other people for whom we may be responsible ?
If the lines of our argument are sound, we shall not
stop short at advice or resolutions to " conquer "
our sexual temptations. The accepted " physical "
advice we shall certainly give and follow ; but there
niust be something more. It is, after all, much
more a psychological than a physical problem
apart from its moral aspect. We shall certainly
dwell upon the power of God and the mastery of
Spirit over matter. But we shall start with a posi-
tive, thrilling challenge to consecrate this best gift
of life in active citizenship of that Kingdom of
which we have been made " inheritors. " We shall
not try merely to encourage a brave resistance to
this impulse ; by prayer and sacraments we shall
try to consecrate it. If we are trying to help an
adolescent we shall tell him what it is creative
power, given him to co-operate with God ; and show
him how Our Lord would have him use it. He
will understand then why the sin is sinful and why
he must doggedly avoid " occasions " of it. And at
once we turn his thoughts (on which all depends)
from preoccupation with his own temptations to
the strongest moral quality he has, namely, loyalty
and that to Christ. (There is the " expulsive
power of a new affection.") But, of course, we must

fo on to be far more concrete. We must set before
im definite suggestions for the direction of his

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creative energies in accordance with the will of God.
And at this point it becomes a personal problem.
" Circumstances define vocation/' and the special
ways in which he must use this power depend on his
gifts, his interests, capacities, all that makes him the
actual boy he is. On this we must lavish our
patience and ingenuity. It may be in art, it may be
in Nature-study ; it may be in looking after another
boy or in some achievement for the good of his
house or the discharge of some responsibility. More
channels than one can probably be opened, and
probably the more of them the better ; for the force
at his disposal is unlimited, and the fuller our
activities, the richer and more fruitful is our life.
(It is the lack of a central guiding purpose which
" dissipates " energy, not the amount expended.)
The whole range of desirable things is there to choose
from all that is honest, lovely, of good report.
All that is true to the mind and will of our Lord,
God wills that we should create on earth. But the
cardinal point is to offer him these activities as what
they are a service to the Lord who claims these
powers of his for the Kingdom's sake. We shall,
too, try to help him to concentrate his prayers on the
sphere of service he has chosen, the creation in
which he is offering God his life, rather than on
the sin which he is resisting. And we shall be able
to lead him on to see that when our wills are set
towards God's will, the Power that upholds the
Universe stands behind us, so that nothing, literally,
is impossible. That faith is the victory that over-
comes.

It must, I think, be admitted that at this point

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the " Public School System " seriously fails. It is,
perhaps, the most damaging criticism which can
reasonably be brought against it that it offers such
a meagre range of interests by which boys can learn
to express themselves. " Work/' which most of
them naturally dislike, and games, which many only
pretend to enjoy, make a scheme far too rigid and
unyielding to be an effective educational instrument.
The system itself, far more than the dreadful
services too often associated with school chapels,
militates against a vital religious teaching, and makes
moral purity needlessly difficult. But there is a
strong tendency now towards enlarging it. And in
any case a clearer understanding of the psycho-
logical principles involved will lead to such modifica-
tions in school-environment as will give the develop-
ing life a better chance.

It must not for a moment be supposed that any
cheapening of the moral issues is involved in what is
here suggested, or any lowering of the claim of purity.
We ask for greater, not less, moral effort. We ask
that the strongest forces in our nature should be used
constructively in unstinting service inspired by
loyalty to the Son of Man instead of being wasted
or left unrealized. And surely we pitch the appeal
a great deal higher by asking for a life of creative
devotion than by appeals to physical self-interest,
or a moral fiat left unexplained that this is just
something which must not be done. We are putting
our Lord in the foreground of the picture, which
therefore, I think, cannot be so very far wrong.

In maturer life, the call will be the same, under

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different circumstances and conditions. The King-
dom demands our whole creative effort. Our
energies will be flung into art, perhaps, or one of
the many forms of social service, or some work of a
more heroic order, such as developing a virgin
territory, in Government service, or as a missionary.
The word of prophecy to-day is " God wills fellow-
ship." There are bridges enough to be built in
the world around us across the gulfs that divide man
from man to enlist all our powers of creation in the
service of the Kingdom. There is truth to be found
in countless different spheres, beauty to be achieved
and love to be won. There is a League of Nations to
be realized, a ruined world to be rebuilt. There
is little need to ask : " What am I to do ? " The
question is rather : " Am I doing it " ? We have to
face the Christ and answer that.

There, to any who have begun to know Him, is
the unescapable challenge to our loyalty, the
subduing appeal which alone can fully " order the
unruly wills and affections of sinful men." Creative
life responds to creative love. It is His call which
supplies the new incentive, the passionate " interest "
asked for by psychology, to draw our turbulent
instincts to Himself and sublimate these energies in
His service till they grow to be what God made them
to become. It is true in this, as in all other ways, that
he that wills to lose his life shall find it.

CHAPTER V.

SUGGESTION AND PRAYER.

IN the last chapter but one we tried to appreciate
something of the extraordinary power which sugges-
tion wields both for good and evil. We must now
attempt to show the relationship of the facts we have
investigated to the teaching of Jesus, and of the
Christian faith.

It will strike us at once if we turn to the New
Testament with a psychological background in our
minds, that His massive insistence upon faith in
God as the source of confidence and power comes
to meet us just at the point we have reached. " To
believe in one's star/ 5 as Baudouin observes, is a
highway to success in life if we think, that is, that
Napoleon " succeeded." It all depends what we
mean by success. But there can be no doubt that
the suggestion of a creative love and holiness ever
delivering the world from evil, near and available
for those who desire it, must be a prime source
of power and moral strength. " Why are you
frightened ? " He asked His dismayed companions :
" how little you trust God ! "

It is, indeed, hard to resist the conviction that
our Lord by a divine intuition was aware of these
laws now analysed by psychology, and taught the
race the true way of controlling them. For myself,

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

I feel sure that many of His cures, both in the
physical and moral spheres (though perhaps He
would not have accepted the distinction) were
worked by this machinery of suggestion. Nor is
there anything here that need alarm us, however
conservative our attitude. For, if we reflect, it
could not be otherwise. Assuming that these
hypotheses are right, i.e. that these are really " laws "
of the mind, and that our Lord, as the Christian
faith asserts, revealed the truth about God and
human life, then inevitably He must have approached
the minds and souls of men and women according to
the laws by which God made them. Again and
again He was at pains to insist that there are no
spiritual short-cuts. The laws of life are what they
are and we must submit to the slow, sure processes
of organic growth and development first the grain,
then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. From
these facts, these laws, He claimed no exemptions.
He knew, say the records, what was in man. He
regarded with respect and reverence His Father's
laws operative in man's being. And on any showing,
Christian or non-Christian, His insight into human
nature, its needs, its character and its possibilities,
was something unapproached in religious history.

But let us make clear, to anticipate misunder-
standing, that in all that follows in this chapter we
are not concerned with credal interpretations. We
cast no doubt on our Lord's " Divinity " by an
attempt to gain some understanding of the actual
methods of work which He employed. We are
only concerned here with the machinery through
which, in fact, Jesus taught and healed. To appre-

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ciate in Jesus " perfect Man, of a reasonable " (i.e.
human) " soul and human flesh subsisting " is as
integral a part of the Catholic faith, though tradi-
tionalists are strangely apt to forget it, as the recogni-
tion of His Divinity. In any case, as we shall see
later, it is an unwarrantable procedure to argue
that if we know (within limits) how certain things
are done, it follows that therefore God did not do
them. To this we recur in a later chapter. But
meanwhile, with this explanation in parenthesis, we
can return to our main line of argument.

It would seem that constantly throughout His
teaching, our Lord definitely referred to the opera-
tion of suggestion.^We have seen that a suggestion
made by another is powerless until it has been
accepted, i.e. until it becomes self-suggestion. When
once accepted, it brings forth its fruits. So He said,
" It is not what comes from without that makes a
man unclean. It is from within, out of the heart of
man that there proceed evil thoughts, adultery,
murder, fornication. These things come from
within and defile the man." But other recorded
sayings may go further. It is commonly said that
the best-known part of His teaching in the Sermon
on the Mount, about the old commandment and the
new, substitutes an inward disposition as the subject
of moral aspiration for a tangible and external act,
writing "Thou shalt be" for " Thou shalt do."
That is true, of course, and it is melancholy to think
how little Christian opinion has begun to rise to the
height of it even yet. Few of us really believe that
to live in hatred or selfishness or unclean imagina-
tions bars the door of the Kingdom of Heaven to us

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as much as committed murder, theft or adultery.
But did He not, perhaps, mean more than this ?
Did He not mean that the imagination is the same
thing as the act committed ? It was perhaps in a
more literal sense than we have been prepared to
recognize that He said " a man that looks lustfully
on a woman has already committed adultery in his
heart." Once the suggestion has been really wel-
comed and worked into the substance of our inner
lives, it is no longer under our control. It inevitably
produces its effect. Our " dominant desire " is our
destiny. 1

Hence the utter life-and-death importance of
controlling the suggestions we accept while it is
still within our own power. People tend to ex-
aggerate the extent to which we are at the mercy of
suggestion. The trouble with most of us is not that
we are too suggestible for the more suggestible we
are the better : but that we are suggestible to the
wrong suggestions. And this, to at least some extent,
is our own fault. For suggestions can be controlled
" at source," if we are prepared for the moral
struggle of purgation and self-discipline and bitter
cost and effort which this involves. It was the
repeated statement of the Master, indeed it lies
near the heart of His teaching, that the fullest life
demands a searching sacrifice. " If your eye leads
you wrong, pull it out : if your hand leads you
wrong, chop it off." The religion of " power and
love and purity " must be a religion of blood and
tears and anguish in the attainment of self-mastery.

There are certain obvious " occasions " of sin,

1 See Chap. VIII. below.
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SUGGESTION AND PRAYER

certain obviously " suggestive " things, which any-
body with any moral seriousness knows he must
avoid altogether. This is plain without argument in
the limited sphere of what are commonly called
" sins of the flesh," though they are essentially sins
of imagination. There are, of course, certain
physiological stimuli by which all normal persons
will expect to be sexually excited. But it is in-
herently likely, and experience seems to suggest that
it is true, that each of us, according to his upbringing,
his temperament and his individual history, is
specially open to some one particular stimulus, often
fixed in its association with some particular place,
person or object. Everyone knows or should know
for himself what is specially dangerous for him.
Sometimes, no doubt, there are complications here.
It sometimes happens that through some incident
in the history of the puson concerned a sexual
stimulus has become associated with something that
is not really sexual. Some tune, some picture, some
literary context, sometimes some perfectly absurd
object, becomes charged with dangerous suggestions.
Instances of this form of perversion which is tech-
nically known as " fetishism " can be studied ad
nauseam in the text-books. Such cases are definitely
pathological. It is no good telling a man to avoid
this perverted stimulus. An inner compulsion
makes that impossible for him. He cannot get free
until an analysis, conducted by himself or by some-
one else, has revealed the underlying cause of the
trouble. As soon as that is done it will probably
cease. In any case, he knows now what the trouble
is and has in his own hands the power of dealing with

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it. Here, then, and in all the other normal cases,
there has got to be a complete renunciation, however
painful the price that has to be paid. " It is better
to limp into Life with one foot than to jump with
both feet into Hell."

Here is room for all the moral effort and self-
discipline and watchfulness which the most ascetic
moralist could ask for. But Our Lord's teaching
does not remain on this level of warning and negation.
His religion is one of positive faith and power, of
holiness that keeps the world sweet, like salt ; and it
rests on unbroken communion with the enveloping
Presence of the Father. Here we begin to touch the
life of prayer.

It is the experience of psycho-therapists that a
suggestion markedly incompatible with the general
character and outlook of the patient tends to be
rejected. The patient cannot be persuaded to take
it into himself and make it his own. Thus there is a
guardian of the gate at the outer gate of conscious-
ness, as well as the censor hypostatized by Freud
who stands between the unconscious and the con-
scious. This gives us the transition we are needing.
For a man who is really trained and disciplined in a
constant purpose of " doing the will of God," whose
life is thus continually open to the suggestion of
power, love and purity, is to a very large extent at
least immunized against wrong suggestions. There
is nothing from without, as Our Lord said, which can
enter into him and defile him. And the object of
the life of prayer, which depends in turn on the
trained habit of " saying our prayers," is to keep the
gate of the mind open to, and appropriate and make

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our own increasingly, all those suggestions which
come from God. " The lamp of the body is the
eye : and if thine eye is single, thy whole body will
be full of light."

If we analyse the experience of the Prophets, we
find that they distinguished very scrupulously
between those inspirations or suggestions which they
held to be definitely divine and those of whose
origin they were uncertain. Jeremiah waited once
for ten whole days, when every minute of delay was
dangerous, to be sure that he had the answer from
the Lord. 1 That is, he was careful to mark the
distinction between divine and mere self-sugges-
tions. Happy the man who is certain of the differ-
ence ! It is the mature fruit of the prayer-life,
But we may justifiably expect that one who lives in
that frank unbroken intercourse with the Heavenly
Father which Jesus has made possible, will have
playing upon his soul continually a stream of gracious
" suggestions " from the Father. And, indeed, it
would seem that the whole devotional system of
prayer and sacraments in the historic Church rests
on the assumption that this is so.

When we look back on the long history of Christian
belief and practice, it may seem as though not
infrequently the Church, by some divinely-given
intuition, has been right in her psychology, in the
way, that is, in which she has dealt with souls, while
at the same time far from satisfying in the reasons
she has given for her practice. The most obvious
case in point is Infant Baptism, which every new
chapter in psychology, every fresh discovery about

1 Jeremiah xlii. 7 : cf. St Paul's distinction in I Cor. vii. 10 and 12.

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

the unconscious, show to be more obviously right.
We need not be tied to any far-fetched theory
about what the formulas call " Original Sin " to be
sure of the fundamental faith and wisdom involved
in bringing the developing life, even before the
appearance of real self-consciousness, under the
influence of Christ-suggestions. It is taken a step
still further back in the Marriage Service.

One may wonder, indeed, whether the same prin-
ciple may not run through the whole sacramental
system the implanting in the soul of divine sugges-
tions through visible media charged with reminis-
:ences of the practice of our Lord and His apostles.

It will be objected at once, I am quite aware, that
this reduces the " objectivity " of the sacramental
Presence to something which is merely suggestion.
In reply to this I would ask " why merely " ? It is
doubtful if one can draw a frontier-line with prayer
and sacraments on one side of it, and suggestion on
the other. There must be a certain debatable
territory. And if the suggestion in this case comes
from God, it just is not " merely suggestion " in the
sense which the objector would intend. , Unless
" real " means " material," which no Christian is
likely to argue seriously, then a sacrament is not less
" real," and the grace which it conveys not less
" objective " if we should find that it enters into the
soul through the machinery which we call " sugges-
tion."

The point which the " objective " view of sacra-
ments (which I myself accept) is concerned to
guard, is God's initiative action. There must be
something offered to us by God, unconditioned by

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SUGGESTION AND PRAYER

our attitude and not called into being by our state
of mind which is what a really " subjective " view
would hold. The sacramental system of the Church
keeps continually alive this recognition of " Trans-
cendence," of a supernatural life which is not our
own, which we cannot make, but are asked to accept
and appropriate, and which can only be drawn from
One Source. Without this sense of mystery and
transcendence, of reaches and depths in the eternal
order which our dimensions cannot fully measure,
religion would very quickly dissolve away into mere
duty or mere emotionalism. There is no doubt
that at least for many of us the historic, sacramental
forms of worship help uniquely to keep this sense
alive.

I hold that we cannot, with the traditionalist,
limit the Church by the circle of its cultus. We
cannot say that without the sacraments consecrated
by historic usage there is no authentic Christianity.
Experience shouts too emphatic a negative. We
cannot fetter and bind the living Spirit by any one
form of Institutionalism. " We do it wrong, being
so majestical, to offer it this show of violence."
Christianity stands or falls, as it seems to me, by
nothing else than by the certainty of a Divine life
of love and power and joy, a life of Spirit which is
not of this world, communicable to men by Jesus
Christ, to raise them up to the " life of the coming
age " or (as we normally say) life eternal, in which
all our values are transvalued. What various other
methods of operation on the human spirit Eternal
Spirit has, by what other various approaches men
may have contact with Jesus who is Life, and feed

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

upon the Bread which came down from heaven, it
is not for us to limit or define. It is certain that for
those of a certain temperament, brought up in a
certain spiritual tradition, the symbolic, sacramental
worships do serve in a way that nothing else can
serve to feed the flame of this conviction and to
mediate this saving Life. But to discuss the
possible psychic channels by which this creative
Spirit is appropriated does not in any way com-
promise our certainties. The Spirit is " there "
independently of ourselves : our faith does not
create the Life. But our faith goes out to welcome
and receive it. That is, the " suggestions " come from
God : it is for us to accept and appropriate them,
to make them in the full sense " self-suggestions/'
worked into the texture of our lives.

Needless to say, I am not here putting forward any
certain or assured conclusions. It is only a hint of a
possible line of thought, and nobody who dislikes it
need believe it. But of this I am sure, that such lines
of thought are necessary. Regret it or not as we
may, it is certainly useless to try to commend the
Church's traditional practices to a generation
impatient of tradition, unless we are ready to attempt
to equate our own spiritual prescriptions with the
current science of the human mind.

It may be worth while to quote here the testimony
of a medical writer on psycho-analysis. " There is,"
he says, " no scientific reason why energy from an
unseen psychic source may not be made available to
energize an enfeebled will. These psycho-thera-
peutic effects [of reclaiming drunkards by the
Salvation Army] may depend largely on the new

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SUGGESTION AND PRAYER

spiritual orientation which is brought about/' 1
This seems to be close to the point we have been
discussing.

I have purposely said very little in this chapter
about specifically religious healing, because it has
been discussed and explained so widely by people
far more competent to deal with it. To pass from
the level of the Guild of Health and the various
methods of spiritual healing, whether by prayer,
imposition of hands, or unction, to that of deep-
breathing, and a magic formula seems like leaving
pure mountain air to enter the stuffy glare of a
cheapjack's shop. Suggestion is bound to appear
a far cruder method, as a moral and spiritual short7
cut.

It is easy to say that one of these is magic, the other
spiritual religion. But the whole attempt we are
making is to refine the admittedly crude process of
suggestion that it may be used in the service of
religion. And it is not clear, if we look below the
surface, that the machinery at work is really different
in the two cases. The difference is in moral quality.
I cannot but think that the " sacramental " means
(anointing with oil after spiritual preparation) now
so widely used for healing, and with such momentous
results, contain this element of suggestion in them.
If they awaken in the patient a vital faith in the power
of a living God, and so unlock creative energies, it
would seem that they mediate God's healing power
partly at any rate by that very means.

Nobody can escape from the conclusion that our
Lord again and again reaffirmed " It is your faith

1 Bousfield in Psyche, Oct. 1921, p. 118,
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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

which has made you whole." Mr Pym has recently
drawn attention l to the preliminary processes used
by Him to arouse faith and expectancy in the patient,
before the cure was wrought. He " took him aside
from the multitude," He " stretched out His hand
and touched him," " commanded him to be brought
to Him," " touched his tongue with His saliva,"
All these are truly at one and the same time both
" suggestive " and " sacramental " means of in-
spiring confidence in His own power, and the power
of the Father in whose name He acted ; though
it was in the end, no doubt, His own presence which
made belief in creative love possible, and purified
the patient's imagination till the suggestion was
fruitfully accepted. Indeed, one may guess that the
connecting link between mere suggestion and the
Christian healing may possibly be contained in this
last clause, or in the Master's own phrase " prayer and
fasting," that is to say, in that spiritual receptiveness
on which we have been insisting all along.

To the famous question, " Why could not we cast
him out " ? two answers are recorded. " Because of
your unbelief," is St Matthew's version of die more
familiar answer in St Mark, " This kind goeth not
out save by prayer and fasting." 2 It is quite likely
that Our Lord said both. At any rate the first
Evangelist half suggests that they are synonymous.

1 Op. cit.> pp. 106-109.

2 Mark ix. i8=Matt. xvii. 19. No doubt Matthew's && rfy 6\i,yowicrrlay
echoes Mark's rb l StivQ ; Trdvra dtivara ry irurTetiovTi from the earlier
part of the story, which Matthew omits perhaps because it seems derogatory
to the Master. It is curious that Matthew, whose " tendency " is (in some
ways) so nearly akin to the Epistle of St James, omits the reference to
" ptayer and fasting," which his ecclesiastical emphasis might naturally
have led him to stress.

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SUGGESTION AND PRAYER

And a rather significant fact is here worth noticing,
It is the tendency of modern writers to describe
moral facts in medical terms. They would rather
speak of a complex than a sin. But Our Lord did
precisely the opposite. He described medical facts
in moral terms. " Thy sins be forgiven," He said
to the paralytic : " Satan has bound her," He said
of the woman's haemorrhage. Possibly we have here
the real distinction involved in specifically Christian
healing. We noticed before, as the reader will
remember, that often mere suggestion will not work
without preliminary analysis. We also observed that
the will to be made whole, the faith in the possibility
of healing, may be inhibited by moral factors, some
factors (that is to say) in the patient's character. Is
it perhaps just here that the Christ avails when the
patient is brought consciously into touch with Him ?
It may be that He by His transforming influence
makes possible the living faith as well as supplying
the power for its satisfaction. There seems to be a
much stronger moral quality in specifically Christian
healing than in M. Coup's method of suggestion.

There is, of course, a great deal more concerned.
There is the mysterious but undoubted fact of the
efficacy of others' prayers in releasing spiritual forces.
There is also the fact that healing may be effected
without the patient's conscious co-operation, and
none who has learnt the lesson of psychology will
cast doubt on such possibilities. The whole question
reaches out beyond our formulas into the eternal
order. We are only just beginning to discover what
new worlds may be opening to us. I am not
attempting to imprison these swift-winged beneficent

ill

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

forces from on high in the fetters of a psychological
formula. We are only trying to find a middle term
between what is stated as a matter of psychology,
and what we can pray for as a matter of faith.

We should also add, before leaving this vast
subject, that there seems no reason to doubt but
many to hold that the sacrament of the Eucharist
could be and is meant to be curative. Why else
does the Church, retaining a reminiscence of the
more unsophisticated Christian outlook, still use
the phrase, " Preserve thy body and soul unto life
eternal " ? Why are the Bishops of the Church of
England even now enjoined to " heal the sick " when
they are invested with their commission ? It appears
that Christianity in the early days never drew the
distinction which we draw between healing the sick
body and healing the sick soul. More and more it is
coming to seem probable that the two are funda-
mentally the same. " Whether is it easier, to say * Thy
sins be forgiven thee,' or to say * Arise and walk * " ?

Whenever Our Lord sent His disciples out to
conduct what we should now call revival-missions,
they were always invested with the double charge,
" Proclaim the Gospel, and heal the sick." This
tradition is firmly embedded in all the strata of the
early records. It is also clear that the apostolic age,
and the early centuries of the Church's life, so inter-
preted the Christian mission. 1 It may well be that
the thought of the present day, both in Christian
circles and outside them, is tending towards the

* The reader should study Harnack's chapter on Christ as " Saviour "
in Mission and Expansion of Christianity (E.T.), Vol. I. Bk. II.
Chap. ii.

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rediscovery of an integral part of the Gospel preached
by Jestis the healing power of a spiritual worship*

But we must now return from this digression
the inadequacy of which I fully realize to complete
what remains to be said about the confluence of
suggestion with the life of prayer in the sphere of
desire and will, and so of conduct. We said (p. 104)
that the object of the life of prayer " is to keep the
gate of the mind open to, and appropriate and make
our own increasingly, all those suggestions which
come from God." We saw reason too for holding,
as will be remembered, that a trained and disciplined
habit of character enables us to exercise control
over those suggestions which affect us. On the
other hand, we saw reason to believe that a suggestion
cannot be expelled by a mere decision of the will :
it will only yield to a counter-suggestion.

Here we may surely see the real meaning of our
Lord's story about the empty house. You can only
expel a wrong imagination by putting a right one in
its place. You cannot drive out devils by Beelzebub
only a good suggestion can master a bad one.
Otherwise, if you leave a vacant place, if you exor-
cise by other than positive methods, it comes back
with " seven other devils more wicked than itself
and the last state of the man is worse than the
first." All psychology reaffirms this teaching. It
is only " the finger of God " that can cast out
devils : positive good is the only cure for evil
and that is the heart of the Sermon on the Mount,
and of the victory of redemptive love at Calvary
and in the Resurrection.

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Never use negative suggestions is the golden rule of
the New Nancy School : and Our Lord's teaching
and practice reinforce this. " Veni Creator"
Baudouin strikingly says, " is a more potent exor-
cism than Retro Satanas" We can see Jesus, in
the Temptation-story, always countering the satanic
suggestions which would have weakened His life and
spoiled His mission by the suggestion of God's
glorious will. " All these things " (said the voice)
" I will give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship
me." " Behind me, Satan " (He flashes back at
once) : " it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord
thy God."

This leads to a practical point which may seem very
small, but is shown by experience to be far-reaching.
It is this that the best protection against temptation
is to give great prominence to Praise and Thanks-
giving, in our evening prayers, perhaps, especially.
It is possible to over-emphasize the practice of.
nightly self-examination, with highly deleterious
effect. Within limits, it is probably indispensable.
We cannot afford to resign our consciousness with
any memory upon it which will close the door to the
divine influence in the mysterious world which we
enter in sleep. But it must be very strongly balanced
by the prayer of contemplating God's perfection.
For if we start the day, or go to bed, with our minds
chiefly occupied with the suggestion of our sin and
weakness we are simply, in the slang-phrase, " asking
for trouble." We are inviting the assaults of evil.
But if our minds were stored with the suggestion of
the glory and the power of God from the moment we
wake to the moment we fall asleep, we should be to a

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SUGGESTION AND PRAYER

very large extent immunized against wrong sugges-
tions, and evil desires would have no dominion over
us. It is, as St Paul said, the shield of faith which
quenches the fiery darts of the evil one.

The creed of some of us appears to be : "I do not
believe that I can conquer evil. I know I am a
coward and a liar, of vicious temper and uncontrolled
passions/' However lamentably true it may be as a
description of one's character, it is a despairing
creed to " face the world with " ! The Christian
creed is rather different : " / believe in God, the
Father Almighty " in an all-sovereign and creative
love.

r Always, therefore, in prayer, we should give time
to this contemplation of the Divine perfectness
His power, His glory and the mightiness of His
Kingdom. For we become what we love. Our
strongest interests control our lives, so psychology
assures us. And did not the Master say long ago
that they who hunger and thirst for goodness shall
be filled ?

And such prayer, based on the certainty of God's
power, and His availability, is the prayer which is
effective in our lives. That we touch here again the
machinery of suggestion and auto-suggestion we
need not hesitate to recognize. Our Lord Himself,
indeed, said as much when He stated that God's
children, when they pray for things, should " believe
that ye have received them, and ye shall have them."
Surely we have here the Christian statement of the
uses of suggestion in the life of communion with
the Father. In Jesus we can call the Eternal
" Father " : and we start our prayer with the

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knowledge that we are speaking not to a sovereign
but to a Father's love.

Enough has been said not to exhaust this question,
but to indicate a line of approach to it which the
reader can follow out for himself. Clearly it leaves
us standing at the gateway of a new Universe of
power and knowledge. It does not, as I have em-
phatically stated, relieve us of any moral effort, or
tend to make religion cheap or easy. Rather it
throws a more impressive emphasis on the need for
purity of heart and all the purgation and discipline
it implies. But it does reveal to us ways in which
by a careful and reverent use of laws which God has
allowed men to discover, we can make a better use of
our own lives. It should help the Christian minister
in his task of presenting every man perfect in Christ.

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CHAPTER VL

THE DANGER OF SUBJECTIVITY IN RELIGION.

THE movement of thought in the last half century
has all been in the direction of emphasizing the
subjective aspect of religion. More and more the
appeal has tended to lie from " dogma " and creed
and a priori reasoning, from any institutional
authority, to the autonomy of Faith. We claim an
indisputable sovereignty for a vital experience of
God in the heart of the believer. " Religion comes
first and Theology afterwards," is one of the pass-
words of this modern attitude. We no longer use
the Bible as an armoury of theological proofs.
Rather we see in it the developing record of the
highest religious experience of men. We have come
to see that the Christian creeds and doctrines are
but attempts to explain to other people and to work
into an intelligible account of things the profound
experience of God in Christ which is the inheritance
of the Christian Body. None claim now a mathe-
matical accuracy for our traditional statements of
belief. They are the best that could be done to
convey the experience to others. They bar the
way against " false " interpretations, such, that is,
as would make impossible the experience of which
the Church is conscious. But it is the experience
which matters, and dogma is measured in terms of

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

its " prayer-value " as witnessed to by a hundred
generations. The authority behind the doctrine,
and the authority of the Church or Bible, is that
of the gathered and stored experience of all those
who have tried and found it true. The main
currents of advancing religious thought, whatever
their differences and divisions, may be said to agree
upon this main position. The whole weight of the
superstructure, whether simple or elaborate, has to
be borne by religious experience. Dr Gore, for
example, bases his entire Reconstruction of Belief
on the religious experience of the Prophets.

Now it goes without saying that this tendency
represents on the whole a substantial achievement
in the cause of progress in religion. And it is,
in fact, a return to the biblical attitude. All the
highest flights of the Prophets are, as is everywhere
recognized, a protest against externalism in religion.
They demand an inward disposition in place of a
formal creed or a ritual cult. They appeal back
from the letter to the spirit. And since Jeremiah,
with his superb insistence on the covenant graven in
men's hearts, no other attitude is possible. Ezekiel
saw the possibility of an inward mystical religion
embodied and expressed in Institutionalism. But
the Institution became petrified by its excessive
emphasis on authority, till a prophet was regarded
as a criminal (Zech. xiii. 2, 3). All that was most
vital in Judaism during the Greek and Roman
periods was kept alive by quietists and apocalyptists,
and they came very largely from the villages of
Galilee. It was from these circles that John the
Baptist came with his revivalistic preaching. And

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DANGER OF SUBJECTIVITY IN RELIGION

he, and the Greater than he who followed after,
both stood in the direct line of the tradition of the
Prophets. Our Lord endorsed and raised to its
highest power their teaching about the inwardness
of religion. " Neither in this mountain nor in
Jerusalem : God is Spirit, and they that worship
Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth."
" God's Kingdom is within you." Religion can
never be the same again as if these sayings had been
left unsaid. There can never be any turning back on
them. And all effective movements of Reform,
since the Church emerged from the Dark Ages, have
been by way of attempts to regain that peak which
the mists of external authority had hidden. What-
ever their mistakes and crudeness, the power of all
those strivings of the Spirit, often so catastrophic in
their effect, which have been truly impulses towards
the future, has lain in their victorious appeal to the
ultimate facts of Christian experience and the
presence of the Kingdom in men's hearts. This is
certainly the line of progress, and it is futile to try
and go back upon it by any agitation for " more
discipline."

Making all allowance for an undeniable bias,
Sabatier's estimate is essentially true. " The con-
servatives of our time who turn to the thirteenth
Century as to the golden age of authoritative faith
make a strange mistake. . . . There was a genuine
attempt at a religious revolution, which if it had
succeeded would have ended in a universal priest-
hood. . . . The effort failed, and though later on the
Revolution made us all kings, neither the thirteenth
Century nor the Reformation was able to make us

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all priests. . . . The thirteenth Century with juvenile
ardour .undertook this revolution, which has not
yet reached its end." l It is still, indeed, only
beginning : but the emphasis of the last two genera-
tions, both in Theology and in the Sciences, is a
definite pressure in the same direction. Con-
temporary Psychology reinforces it. In so far as
this is so, it is all to the good.

At the same time it is well to recognize that there
are really pressing dangers to spiritual and intel-
lectual freedom involved in the tendencies of the
present day. Just as " free thought " has become
fettered thought incarcerated in mechanical cate-
gories, the slave of an orthodoxy long since obsolete,
so our hardly-won spirit of freedom, with its costly
conquest of religious " inwardness," may easily
prove a prison-house of the soul. For a really
thorough-going subjectivism, such as seems to fas-
cinate popular thought to-day, reduces the wojrld to
crass superstition. And the danger is, lest the in-
terest in Psychology with which we are concerned
in these lectures, so far from being a means to set
men free which is what it rightly claims as its own
objective should result in putting our minds and
souls in irons. It will therefore, I hope, be not
thought irrelevant, even in so summary a discussion,
if we spend a short time in examining this danger
which is, I believe, by no means imaginary.

The fashionable disparagement of Reason was
bound, sooner or later, to bring its punishment.
The reaction against mere intellectualism of an

1 $t Francis of Assist, Introduction, p, xiii.

DANGER OF SUBJECTIVITY IN RELIGION

abstract and academic type was no doubt healthy
and desirable. It was a protest against " bloodless
categories " which desiccate the real, concrete life
of reality as we meet it in our experience. It was
right to insist that thought is the thought of thinkers,
who are actual men with hopes and desires and
passions ; that our thought is largely controlled by
our interests ; and that at any rate to start with
the thinker's aim is practical rather than speculative.
Psychology and Philosophy were right in relating
thought more closely to will and feeling, as a function
of living personalities encountering real objects in
experience. That brings thought into contact with
our purposes and the whole system of our moral life.
But the reaction has swung out too far. To say
that Reason cannot be considered in abstraction
from the living man who reasons, is a very different
thing indeed from saying that Reason is a slave and
no longer master. That is equivalent to disowning
all the conquests of the human mind. But in a
good deal of recent Philosophy this conclusion is
practically reached. It is what we will that matters,
not what is true.

" Hoc volo, sic iubeo : stet pro ratione voluntas." 1
But that is the whole philosophy of Prussianism :
" Necessity knows no law." As soon as you give up
an objective faith, then the only way to argue any
case is (in the end) by the argument of war.

And here the current researches in Psychology
give support, from their side, to this " voluntarist "
philosophy. They, too, tend to dethrone Reason

1 "This is my will and so I order : let my will be your reason/'
Juvenal,

IZl

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

and to offer the crown to the " Unconscious/ 5 or at
least to something which is infra-rational. The
result was almost bound to be obscurantism. Truth
may perish, the life-force must prevail. For though
we have seen already and shall see further that there
is both truth and value in this reaction, yet the
alliance of these two powerful tendencies bids fair
unless resisted and guided rightly to drive back the
human spirit into a jungle of superstitious barbarism.
It is, as it were, a raid by the ape and the tiger on the
little clearing round the house of Mansoul.

Let us watch what is happening from closer
quarters.

We can recognize gladly, and even insist upofi, the
high importance of Psychology to the student and
teacher of Christianity, and still believe it is being
driven to death in many spheres of thought beside
our own, till the word has become almost an incanta-
tion. Religiously, this is producing strange results.
For there is (except among professional Theologians
who ignore the matter as one of no importance) an
almost indecent interest at present in the Psychology
of Religion. And here we seem to find ourselves
back again in a long ago discredited situation where
experience is equated with sheer feeling. It is
hardly a caricature, indeed, to say that some of the
weaker writing from this standpoint is really dis-
cussing " what God feels like." The limitation of
all these treatises on the psychology of religious
experience, 1 especially by the questionnaire method,

1 I do not criticize Pratt's Religious Consciousness, which I think is
quite the best book of its kind.

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DANGER OF SUBJECTIVITY IN RELIGION

is that the tendency becomes more and more to
identify religion with certain states of emotional
excitement that is, in the end, to make it a matter
of temperament. What, then, of those who do not
share this temperament ? Is there no religious
experience for them ? This is all a recrudescence
of the peril which beset the primitive Church of the
first generation. Behind the books of the New
Testament one can detect precisely the same
tendency to identify the " Christian experience "
with certain psychological phenomena which seem
often to have accompanied it. But they are the
accident and not the essence. Any religion can
make people " speak with tongues." It was St
Paul and St John who saved the Church from so
disastrous an equation. They said what needs to be
said to-day with emphasis, that no intensity of feel-
ing guarantees the value of an experience, or gives
any real explanation of it. It is the content of experi-
ence, not its feeling tone, that matters. No one
would think that to analyse the bath-water either
explains or explains away the baby. But no more
does the analysis of an experiencing mind explain or
explain away what is experienced. Sooner or later
we have got to ask whether the thing experienced is
good, and whether the theory believed is true. We
must " try the spirits, whether they be of God."
To stress religious experience is sound : but it leaves
us in a swamp of morbid psychology unless we bring
it all to the test of an objective standard of truth and
value.

It would therefore seem a short-sighted piece of
tactics when apologists seize upon pragmatist ways

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

of thinking as allies in defence of Christianity. For,
after all, a religion abdicates any claim to men's
spiritual allegiance if it shuns the glare of daylight
reason and draws its blinds when the noontide sun
is up. It is not enough to say of a religion that it
is comforting or stabilizing, or that it produces an
intense experience. The question that must be
faced is Is IT TRUE ? The pragmatic appeal
it is true because it wins souls is, to say the least, a
two-edged weapon. For there is no idea so fatuous
but that it will succeed in " winning souls. " The
question is, to what does it win them ? And
Christianity, at any rate, claims to be a true revela-
tion of the character of God. Let us realize fear-
lessly that unless it is true, then every convert made
is a new soul damned. The mere fact that I do, or
do not, feel pleasant feelings, seems to be very largely
irrelevant. What matters is whether my experience
is indeed an experience of Reality. Thus, I suggest,
the increasing recognition of the non-rational factors
that are involved in our intellectual processes (to
which we have already given attention) does not
prove what it is sometimes held to prove. It does
not mean that Truth is unimportant and that
religion can grovel about in shadow. The corol-
lary is surely just the opposite. We cannot live
with the shadows in the cave. We demand with a
more imperious necessity a really valid standard of
Truth and Goodness by which we can appraise our
experiences, which can be the goal of our will and our
desire, and its light a trusty lantern unto our feet.

Thus our argument seems to be following round a

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DANGER OF SUBJECTIVITY IN RELIGION

circle : but not every circular argument is fallacious.
In the present case, the facts themselves demand it.
For while, on the one hand, Dogma and Theology
are interpretations of religion, presupposing " reli-
gious experience " as the subject-matter on which
they work, yet it is also true that religious experience
depends for its richness and validity upon a true and
satisfying Theology. I would quote on this point
some wise words of Dr Rashdall : " The notion that
religious experience is always the same, and that
different religious or doctrinal systems are merely
different ways of expressing it, is one of the most
absurd suppositions that a sane man ever main-
tained. It is refuted on every side by History, by
Psychology, by. . . . Comparative Religion. . . .
To a certain extent, no doubt, religious systems are
theories invented to account for experiences which
are more or less the same ; but it is quite equally
true that the character of a religious experience is
determined in great part by the intellectual theories
which have previously been accepted, whether from
conscious reflection or tradition, from instruction or
environment, from emotional or temperamental
attraction. . . . To suppose that a savage who has
conceived an admiration for the character of Christ
and worships a God whom he thinks of as like Christ,
really had the same religious experience when he
worshipped a Deity whose chief delight was human
sacrifice or the smell of roast pig, is too ludicrous a
supposition to be entertained by any one for whom
* religious experience ' is more than something to be
read about in works upon religious Philosophy/' l

1 The Idea of Atonement (Bampton Lectures), Appendix L pp. 472-3.

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

It is always the danger of institutional religion
to underestimate the value of Truth, and to urge
conformity to its Theology as the guarantee of
obtaining its experience. But, while it probably is
true that no one can appreciate a doctrine till he has
at least to some extent entered into the experience
which the doctrine attempts to express in terms of
intellect, it is also true that an obsolete Theology,
if pressed as a condition of membership, may posi-
tively prevent the would-be member from making
the real experience his own. This applies with
some force to the Church of England now. For it
is certain that much of our Theology, and especially
some of the language of the Prayer-book, is in hope-
less conflict with the Christ-experience which the
Church is in the world to mediate. It is no mere
academic intellectualism which is crying now for a
revised Theology. It is not the hobby of superior
persons. It is rather a plea on behalf of the simple
folk and of those thousands who stand outside the
Institution and yet long to share in its experience.
For to whatever extent the experience is condi-
tioned by intellectual statements, it is clear that the
thought of and attitude towards God which our
Anglican worship, and some of our formulas, tend to
impose upon the mind, do definitely debar the wor-
shipper from the vital experience of God in Christ.
Thus, those of us who most hate intellectualism,
who value love and joy and peace above all the
wisdom of the sages, and who long for a revival in
this country of a simple, evangelical, Christian life
of faith and fellowship and freedom, are bound to
keep raising our voices for " re-statement." A

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DANGER OF SUBJECTIVITY IN RELIGION

theological re-statement, adequate both to the
knowledge of our day and to the vast simplicity of
Jesus, is the indispensable preliminary to any real
revival of Religion. The so-called " modernists "
are modernists because of their reverence for the
Catholic Faith, and their evangelical desire to propa-
gate it. It is vital that men's religious beliefs be
true : equally vital that they be few and simple.

On the other hand, the need for objective standards
by which to criticise subjective " experiences," leads
to a strong recognition of the necessity for the mas-
sive thrust and pressure of Institutionalism as the
counter-stress to keep the souPs life balanced.
Without some standard outside oneself, to which,
one's thoughts and acts can be referred, even ordinary
duty becomes meaningless. And here the Catholic
Church has certainly been truer to the deepest
human needs than are some of the movements of
contemporary thought. For it offers an objective
standard by which to test the individual's faith,
" There lies more doubt in honest faith " than the
isolated individual, unless he be cast in a very heroic
mould, would normally be able to overcome. At
the same time, the individual's experience must
submit to criticism and verification, if it would
substantiate its claim to be true. The authority of
the Christian Society the tested experience of
twenty centuries corroborates the individual's faith
and reinforces it in the hour of trial. It also sup-
plies a standard of reference to correct its vagaries
and eccentricities.

Institutionalism can also be seen from another
point of view to be essential. No progress is con-

127

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

ceivable without a fixed goal towards which you
progress. If we change " the object of our journey "
every time we change our clothes, we are not very
likely to get far on the way. Thus the idea, which is
fashionable at present, of an immanent purpose or
teleology guiding life in its advance, which has yet
no fixed goal before it, would seem to be an idea
which has no real meaning. No doubt the concep-
tion of an dan vital, a life-force ever self-creating,
pressing forward to ever new achievements, which
Jung has introduced into Psychology, has highly
valuable points of contact with the Christian doctrine
of the Holy Spirit. It may be found, later, to be
the best way of stating it. But, as it stands, it is
monstrously unsatisfying. An immanence undir-
ected by transcendence, a purpose but not of
anything in particular what a morass of confused
thought is here ! There is more concerned than
a mere debating-point : it touches the whole func-
tion of the Church approached from the psycho-
logical point of view. For if, as is often said now,
we create our " values," the developing life as it
cuts into reality shaping out its values for itself
whatever it values having absolute worth, and
interference by others being sacrilege then the
world is a moral lunatic asylum. This is indivi-
dualism in hysteria. I cannot conceive that the
Universe means anything unless values are rooted
in its reality ultimately in the Creative Mind that
informs it to exactly the same extent as truth.
The whole art of living, and all advance in it, seems
to be concerned with a growing understanding of
the things that are " more excellent," and a growing

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DANGER OF SUBJECTIVITY IN RELIGION

desire to live one's life in accordance with them.
When a -man thinks that certain things are good,
it is (one would think) sufficiently obvious that he
is either right or wrong about it. He is right in so far
as the things by which he lives are indeed things which
in themselves are good if his standards correspond
with truth. Christianity has always claimed to reveal,
embodied in a personal life, God's standards of valua-
tion. The Body of Christ exists to witness to them.
Now there is no doubt that the crass conservatism
of the majority of our congregations is a symptom of
something wrong in our Psychology. The herd
instinct holds us like a vice and few have achieved
emancipation from it. We have not so taught the
religion of Christ as to give initiative and spontaneity
and a passion for spiritual exploration. Clearly the
social instinct must be operative : but the social-
consciousness of the Christian Group should be a
common enterprise and adventurousness. (The
Psychology of the " old regulars," as contrasted with
that of the New Army officers, supplies an illuminat-
ing illustration.) The Institution like any decent
school should be the training ground of spiritual
freedom. But this is no argument for individualism :
rather it tells in the opposite direction. For while,
as a matter of educational method moral or reli-
gious or political it is infinitely more important
that people should choose for themselves, and perhaps
choose wrongly, than that others should make right
decisions for them, yet there are things that they
ought to believe and choose. The aim of education,
plainly enough, is to lead the growing life out into
freedom ; and this is as true of the Church as it is

129 i

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

of the school. But we may endeavour with all our
love and patience to help people to achieve their
inner liberty, and yet realize that they will never
win it except in so far as they manage to bring their
lives into correspondence with the will of God and
their minds into correspondence with His truth.
Otherwise all is chaos and un-freedom. So that
there are, as I cannot but think, some limits to the
non-interference theory of education. I may hate
repressive discipline of all kinds as the enemy of God :
but I am bound at any rate to hope that people will
realize that the end of life is what (as a Christian)
I believe it is, and to try and lead them towards that
realization as the condition of their liberty. It is
impossible to teach without at least some fixed
standards of what in life is true and good and desir-
able. All the more, then, if the blind lead the
blind, the journey is likely to end in disaster. It is
imperative that the ideals by which (whether con-
sciously or unconsciously learnt) the child steers his
life, should be true.

It would seem, then, that regarded from this
standpoint, one of the functions of the Church as
the school of spiritual freedom, is to keep clear and
sharp before men's vision what is true and what is of
absolute worth, and by all the resources of suggestion
to inspire an experience of God in Christ a fixed
point which makes possible progress towards real
liberty. When we know the truth, the truth sets
us free. But truth, as we have emphasized already,
is not attainable by " pure reason " : it is the
thinker who attains to it. Thus, the suggestive
force of the life of the Society witnessing to its

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DANGER OF SUBJECTIVITY IN RELIGION

Values in its conduct, is its main instrument of
education. But without such a fixed standard of
truth and goodness kept ever fresh and clear by the
play of criticism it is hard to see how life can be
sane or free. " Religious experience " remains a
welter of undifferentiated feelings.

There is a notion, which we shall discuss later,
that Christianity can be " explained " as a projection
of unconscious motives, mainly sexual in origin,
embodying themselves in a mythology which brings a
sense of release in the inner struggle, as merely a set
of imaginary symbolism side-by-side with the other
mythologies. It is, therefore, fundamentally im-
portant to insist that the Christian experience is
wholly and irrevocably conditioned by a life that was
actually lived in history " in the fifteenth year of the
reign of Tiberius Caesar." The religion of an
Incarnation built and founded on historic fact is the
guarantee of objectivity, of a standard of reference
for our " experience. 55 All this, after all, is as old
as Christianity. The tendency of the early second
century, generally covered by the name Docetism,
was, as St John said roundly, to " dissolve Jesus 55 1
into a subjective phantom. By making light of the
historic Person, and spiriting His humanity away, it
would have lost its loyalty to fact and put a set
of vaguely religious emotions in .place of obedience
to a personal Master. Thus, when the primitive
Church in Asia Minor stood on the frontier of the
western world, and held back all that tide of nebulous
thought by insisting on her tremendous experience
of God manifested in the flesh, she was really strik-

1 I John iv. 3 (Atfet).

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

ing a victorious blow for Intellectual and moral
freedom. She knew that men are " called to
liberty " and that this " new thought " meant
spiritual serfdom. The tragedy is to reflect how,
in later centuries, she turned her achievement into
another tyranny. We cannot rightly accept on her
authority statements about History or Science : they
must abide the question of research. But it is, all the
same, as the great expert in the values of the spiritual
life (rooted in an actual Personality and an abiding
Presence in her midst) that the Church makes possible
for the individual the escape from mere self-limited
subjectivism into the freedom of the City of God.

There are other points in which the current
tendencies are a real danger to spiritual autonomy.
To the emphasis on " religious experience " is added
now a microscopic interest in the operations of the
sub-conscious. The result is, often, that people
give pride of place to whatever comes from the
unconscious mind. But this is a retrospective step
if there ever was one a step right back as far as the
Books of Samuel. It is in the primitive stages of
religion that inspiration is identified with the
hysterical and the abnormal. One would have sup-
posed that we had outgrown that. But people
to-day seem often inclined to estimate the import-
ance of psychological phenomena and not least
those which occur: in the sphere of religion by
their distance from the conscious Reason. Now, it
may be true that the unconscious mind sometimes
(even frequently) mediates higher truth and super-
normal knowledge, as in some cases of " medium-
ship " and genius. And it seems to be certainly

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DANGER OF SUBJECTIVITY IN RELIGION

true that in trance and dream doors are opened into
the unseen which are barred against the mind in
waling hours. But it needs to be said, in face of
this crude tendency, that, because an idea comes
from the unconscious, it is not therefore to be judged
superior to the deliverances of deliberate Reason.
It is not the channel through which it comes to us
but its content and effect which really matters.
The truth or falsity of a prophet's message is not
decided by his excitability, but by the intrinsic
value of what he says. " By their fruits ye shall
know them," it was decided 2000 years ago. To go
back on that is to find ourselves at Delphi, or the
still cruder shrine of the witch-doctor. If anyone
doubts this, let me quote a sentence from the leader
of the Zurich School : " It seems to me that we
might still make use in some way of [Christianity's]
form of thought, and especially its great wisdom of
life, which for two thousand years has been par-
ticularly efficacious. The stumbling-block is the
unhappy combination of religion and morality. That
must be overcome." * It would seem that Amos,
Micah and their colleagues were more " inspired "
than some of us, after all !

It is just in this blurring of the moral emphasis
that one of the greatest dangers, I think, lies ; and I
want to consider it lastly from this standpoint. I
must not be taken to decry " religious experience."
I am incapable of understanding how any Religion
can rest, in the last resort, on any authority except
experience. Nor can I conceive a Christianity
whose central certainty builds on anything else than

1 Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, E.T., p. 45. (His italics.)

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

the personal companionship of Jesus. Religion that
does not spring from a living experience appears to
me to be merely ecclesiasticism. 1 ' But I am con-
cerned to argue here for the widest possible inter-
pretation of " experience " of God. It cannot be
confined to states of feeling, or to any one form of
impression or expression. The attempts to do so
have always been disastrous. It is the weakness of
William James and Starbuck that the experiences
which they relate are, nearly always, thoroughly
abnormal. To make them normative is fatal.
And the drab, actual fact appears to be that the vast
majority of religious people are strangers to religious
experience in the sense of the Varieties altogether.
It is not unnecessary to emphasise this. For the
prevalent tendency to introspection, to the cultiva-
tion or analysis of religious states of mind, is a gross
misrepresentation of Christianity. Indeed, the at-
mosphere we breathe to-day in circles which are
most occupied with religion, might almost be called
fundamentally irreligious. It is all concerned with
ourselves and not with God. But nothing could be
easily imagined more remote from the outlook of
our Lord. In His religion there is no trace of all
this. The deep, calm certainty of His God-
experience (and what else can religious experience
validly mean ?) has no touch of this feverish emo-
tionalism. The nearest approach to a definition of
the real nature of religion that can be gathered
from His teaching is, that religion is doing the will
of God. And this illuminates the point now before

1 Pratt, The Religious Consciousness, Chap. XVI,, has an excellent
discussion of " the milder form of mystic experience, "

'34

DANGER OF SUBJECTIVITY IN RELIGION

<jjis. For it seems to show that the emotional tone
which in some cases, but by no means always,
accompanies the activities of religion, is on the
circumference, not at the centre. Some men, as
they try to do the will of God in the circumstances
which confront them, are conscious of a sense of
exhilaration and joy and added strength and inward
peace which literally passes understanding. Many
are not : it is largely a matter of temperament and,
within limits, of physical health. But " doing the
will " is the essential thing. Some, as they offer their
will to God in prayer, are overwhelmed by the con-
sciousness of His Presence. Some are not : but their
prayer is not less real. For the dedication of our
wills, and perfect confidence inHisWill as it is revealed
in Jesus, is surely the heart of the Christian religion.
It is vital, I suggest, to recognize this. For to
equate religion with states of feeling which for many
men seem inaccessible, is to rob it of its catholicity.
" Well, I don't feel like that, and so I suppose Reli-
gion is not for me," is the obvious and inevitable
answer. And, further, the attempt to cultivate
intense forms of emotional experience leads to a
very severe moral danger. The whole history of
religion shows how desperately narrow is the line
which marks off religion from immorality when
emotion is thus allowed the central place. It can be
watched in the large-scale mass-emotions (helped by
the psychology of crowds) where personality is
handed over to the torrential semi-conscious forces
undirected by intellect and will, with the wildest
licence often following. And it can be watched in
the individual life. No one can have been closely

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

in touch with young men who are temperamental!;
religious and not have, in his secret knowledge, a
dreadful catalogue of lives which have been brought
to the verge of moral shipwreck by this misleading
attempt to " get religion." There are people who
start from the equation of " experience " with
certain intense forms of emotional tone, and then
set themselves to stimulate and guarantee, for their
own satisfaction, these undeniably delightful sen-
sations. The result is a most unhealthy " introver-
sion " a turning inwards on the self and frequently
such a weakening of the will that their powers of
moral resistance are undermined. Not infrequently
it even stimulates the kindred emotions bound up
with sexual passion. The step to moral disaster is a
short one. As a rule these people belong to the
well-marked type which may not unfairly be called
the devotee. They live, as a general rule, in a
world of feeling without much intellectual back-
ground or disciplined, purposive direction of life.
They take to religion as ducks take to water. 1 And
for them, religion of this subjective kind, so far
from being a liberating force, is definitely a prison
and a bondage. It holds them back from the
conquest of their freedom. This is, no doubt,
distressing enough to record, but it is a not un-
important illustration of the danger of this new
subjectivism, to which we are here concerned to
call attention. And behind these facts lies a psycho-
logical fallacy no less than a theological absurdity.

1 Cf. Thurston, in Hugh Walpole's novel, The Captives ; " I may
be the greatest humbug out, but I'm religious. Religion is like 'aving
a 'are lip once you're got it you'll be bothered with it all your life."

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DANGER OF SUBJECTIVITY IN RELIGION

Emotion, properly, is bound up with instinct,
tftat is to say, with an impulse to an action. To each
instinct corresponds its own emotion which normally
accompanies its exercise, just as the satisfaction of a
desire carries with it its own pleasure-tone. It is
the commonplace of moralists that to live for
pleasure leads to disillusionment. The reason is,
that the pleasure is bound up with the satisfaction
of desires. If we pursue certain objects of desire
we experience pleasure in their realization. If we
pursue " pleasure " in itself, apart from the object
with the attainment of which the pleasurable sensa-
tion is bound up, we are living for a will o* the wisp.
It is a psychological perversion. 1 And it is precisely
the same in the case before us. The position of the
religious dilettante, desiring the emotions of reli-
gion as an end in their own right apart from religious
actions, is really comparable to that of the gourmet
cultivating the food-pleasure and not the satisfaction
of his hunger as the end of his activities. It is
erecting into an end to aim at something which
ought to accompany an action. And thus the
psychic energy gets short-circuited. The condition
of the soul must be unhealthy till its creative
energies are unlocked and flowing freely towards
appropriate ends.

But just this is the life of Christianity, with its
insistence on the Kingdom of God and the call of
Him who proclaims and offers it, as the goal and aim
of the disciple's life.

* Cf. McDougall, op. cit. ; Rashdali, Theory of Good and Evil, Vol. I.
Book I. Chap. ii.

CHAPTER VIL

CHRISTIAN POWER AND RESOURCES.

A WELL-KNOWN American writer on the psychology
of religion once said in a half-contemptuous epigram
that it does not matter what we believe about God :
the point of religion is to use Him. Needless to say,
the attitude disclosed in this often-quoted saying
is profoundly irreligious. It is quite a good descrip-
tion of primitive magic, the point of which is to
force the gods to your will But it does contain,
like most violent paradoxes, a certain element of
truth. It is true that what most of us want from
God, and rightly expect from religion, is power to live
well. We may even say, if we know what we are
saying, that Christianity is will to power. For it is
obvious enough that the secret of all power and
effectiveness must lie in a right relationship to the
creative and sustaining Will upon which we, and
all living, depend. And it is true that one of the
deepest needs of the generation in which we live is
to find the secret springs of power. For the char-
acteristic feature of our time is a certain pathetic
moral impotence. There is no lack of good will and
aspiration, but there is little effective driving-power.
Very little, as we say, " gets done." And some, in
despair of achieving their hopes and aims, are driven
into a despairing violence, while others sink into the
still more dangerous attitude of mere cynical

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CHRISTIAN POWER AND RESOURCES

acquiescence, half frivolous and half fatalistic.
Obviously, the limp benevolence of our own post-
war age needs some new galvanic force to make it
taut and vital and effective. And this should be the
function of religion.

Christianity came into a world, disillusioned and
despairing, listless, heart-weary, and morally in-
effective, and presented itself to that world, in
Harnack's phrase, as " the religion of the Spirit and
Power/' 1 It gave men new moral energy : it lifted
them out of despair and gave them hope. It drew
them out of listlessness and inertia into a life of faith
and power and achievement. For the Spirit of
God is life and power. " You shall receive power"
said the Master, " after the Holy Spirit is come upon
you " (Acts i. 8) : and the New Testament is very
largely the picture of their reception of His endow-
ment. The New Testament ought to be approached
not as a text-book of Theology there are several
theologies in it all in the making but as the record
of tremendous things that happened in the lives of
men and women. And the dominant note of it is
certainly Power. Its crucial word, as has been so
often said, is Dynamite (Swapis) mighty to the
casting down of strongholds. From the naive
account of the great irruption of irresistible energies
at Pentecost, when there came a sound like a rushing,
mighty wind, through the records of the Apostolic
age, with its miraculous achievements in the creation
of a new moral order, and building up an organized
social life as full of initiative as it was stable, which

1 Mission and Expansion, English translation, Vol. I, Book II.
Chap. v.

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

alone stood fast when civilization fell it is the same
story all the way. The triumph of Christianity in
the Empire was the triumph of ethical achievement.
For those generations, beyond any doubt, Chris-
tianity meant primarily life re-charged and re-
directed. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the
impression left on us by the New Testament of lives
that out of weakness were made strong, expressing
themselves freely and creatively in triumphant and
effective service.

It is the secret of this spontaneity, the inner
dynamic of these unseen resources, that the world
needs chiefly to recapture now. What has Chris-
tianity to say in practice of this " psychology of
power " ? l For most of us live habitually (as W.
James said) far below our maximum of energy.
And if this be so, it must be because we fail to
appreciate or to utilize to the full, those inexhaus-
tible resources which Christianity puts at our
disposal. Christianity supplies what Psychology
declares we need if we are to realize our own possi-
bilities. This, at least, we venture to claim here ;
and must attempt to vindicate the claim.

Now it has been shown by well-known experi-
ments that fatigue and exhaustion are, if not entirely,
at least largely, mental in their origin. They are
certainly nervous rather than muscular, and there
are many facts tending to show that mental causes
play the chief part in the apparent weariness of the
body. Under suggestion, a man's normal grip on a
" dynamometer " may be vastly increased or reduced

* The title of Dr Efadficld's essay already quoted, with which th
reader must at all costs make himself familiar.

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CHRISTIAN POWER AND RESOURCES

to a minus quantity, and in similar experiments with
an"*' ergo-graph," the result is known to be " favour-
ably influenced by increased interest, pleasure, or
other mental excitement*" * From these and like
facts, Hadfield draws the inference that " the limits
of possibility in our daily lives are defined less by the
body than by the mind, and . . . the resources of
power are psychic rather than physical in character.
. . . The mind is exhausted before the body" *
There are, indeed, unseen sources of psychic power,
on which we can draw without limit and unfailingly.
And the more energy we can draw from them, the
more energy there is available. For God " gives not
the Spirit by measure into us." But the condition
of making fully ours this stream of inexhaustible
power is that we shall spend it freely. The more we
use, the more is given us. Freely we receive if we
freely give. Perhaps we are wasting the resources
of the Spirit by not using them sufficiently, or living
our lives at sufficiently high pressure. " None is so
healthy and fresh as he who gives freely of his
strength and thereby liberates his impulses . . . into
quickened activity." 8

Put that into Christian terms, and what does it
mean but that Power can only be thought of in terms of
service ? It is the first law of God's dealings with
us that no gift is given us merely to enjoy : our
" gifts " are ours in stewardship for service. So the
power and resources of the Spirit are given us only
if we are prepared to spend them. It is he who is

1 0. S. Myers, Introduction to Experimental Psychology ', Chap, VI;
(on Mental Tests).
8 Op. oit n pp. 79-80. 8 Hadfield, op. cit., p. 103.

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

willing to lose his life who finds it. Those who are
pledged and sworn to God's service can rely upon
His power to see them through.

Now, at this point, the teaching of Our Lord
satisfies a psychological need. For the great re-
pressor of energy is aimlessness. People who are,
as we commonly say, " born tired " are those who
have no conscious aim in service. All of us know
that there is nothing which leaves one so entirely
exhausted as doing nothing in particular. Non-
expression, as Maurice Nicoll explains from a quite
different point of view, is as bad for our mental and
moral health, and as debilitating as repression.
Spiritual listlessness (accedie) is the commonest
mental ailment. And here our Lord comes and
confronts people who, like the women at the
Sepulchre, are sitting sadly beside their buried hopes,
aud calls them out to the growing point of life, to
new contact with reality. We must not seek the
living among the dead : " Go and tell My disciples."
" Let the dead bury their dead, go thou and preach
the Kingdom of God." "Come, follow Me."
" Ye have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you . . .
that you should go and bring forth fruit." He
gives life power by giving it purpose : He challenges
us with a Divine Vocation. Nobody who has once
come into touch with Jesus can say any longer that
life has no aim or meaning. But to know the
immense task He expects of us is the highway to
power and freedom.

But there are conditions. Our psychic no less
than our physical life demands the rhythmic alter-
nation of activity with quiet, of storing up power

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CHRISTIAN POWER AND RESOURCES

with its expenditure. Nobody is always active, as
Aristotle faithfully observed. Energy depends on
rest. And it is a prime source of the moral power-
lessness of the thin age in which we live that it allows
so little time for quiet. The gospel of strenuous
endeavour, so dear to the Anglo-Saxon temper, is
indeed defeating its own object. We cannot be
effectively strenuous because we have made a fetish
of mere activity. We conceive religion, in the
West, almost entirely in terms of doing things.
Quietism is a term of reproach. There is something
feverish and hectic about our religion as well as
about our work. The clergy are like directors of
large businesses, and people who are most concerned
with religion are most conspicuously in a hurry.
In the East they adopt a different standard of value.
" What a holy man that must be," they say : " he
never does anything." We can feel that this is a
distorted perspective and yet be conscious that our
western standards are equally distant from the
truth. " How holy he is/ 5 we say : " he is always
busy. He never has a minute to himself. When-
ever I start talking to him about God he always flies
off in the middle of our conversation to his next
engagement. He never sits down to think or read a
book." This is true too often, but obviously " all
wrong." Religion is continually in danger of becom-
ing a caricature of itself. The inner peace tends to
get crowded out. And because it is so, our lives
grow superficial, and our efforts starved and tired
and ineffective. We must recover the power of
concentration if we want to recover the secret of
effectiveness.

H3

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

The fact is, I suppose, that western society with
its cult of possessing things and " getting things
done," has lost the contemplative attitude which
must have its place in all full and worthy life. And
this loss has impoverished Western Christianity.
We allow small value to meditation and do not under-
stand the prayer of contemplation. We regard that
as an oddity of the " Mystics " who are prevented by
their peculiar temperament from a normal life of
religious activity, Yet life with no space left in it
for contemplation is not life at all but western
civilization. And as for the " Mystics," it has been
shown lately in Dom Butler's brilliant book l that
the Western Church has always held the, opinion
that the mystic vision of the contemplative is no
monopoly of the " temperamental," but the normal
goal of the spiritual life for all Christians who will
take it seriously.

We were led to emphasize in the previous chapter
the danger of religious subjectivity. Religion, we
emphasized, does not consist in the cultivation of
certain mental states, but in active co-operation with
God's will. We must balance this now by an
equally strong insistence on the need for collected-
ness and contemplation. Without these periods of
meditation there can be no effectiveness in action.
We are all too anxious to explain away Our Lord's
preference of Mary's life to Martha's.

But, given the recognition of this need, it is easy
to see how the faith of Christianity opens to us
sources of power here. It would seem to be true

1 Western Mysticism (1922), by Dom Cuthbert Butler, O.S.B., Abbot
of Downside. (Constables.) This is a very good book indeed.

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CHRISTIAN POWER AND RESOURCES

that meditation and the method of suggestion join
ha^ds. That self-collectedness or " introversion "
about which the mystical writers say so much is the
necessary preliminary of both. And as the soul
draws in on its own centre, away from the distracting
processes of spending and getting, becoming and
ceasing to be, and tastes for a moment the life which
is eternal, there it enters into communion with
God, in whom all its desires and aspirations are
perfectly fulfilled and guaranteed. In the silence
where God is, our weaknesses and our problems fall
away. It is probable that a far larger portion of the
time allotted by each of us to prayer should be given
to prayer of this more " suggestive " type. We
should quietly affirm to ourselves all the endow-
ments of whose need we are most conscious, ourselves
simply confident and expectant in the light of the
great certainty of God. This prayer of quiet is
happily being revived, especially through the efforts
of Canon Hepher and the Fellowship of Silence.

It may perhaps be that some who read this book
will feel out of their depth in the last paragraph.
It may seem to them unreal. It may seem to reflect
too advanced a stage in the spiritual life though
if it were really so I could not discuss it or to be
concerned with an experience which they have not
yet been able to authenticate. If this should be so,
the same thing can be put in another way, in language
which may sound more familiar. We have seen
the importance of Imagination in the attainment of
our highest capacities. " Every day I am getting
better and better," according to the well-worn
formula. I have merely been discussing this exer-

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

else in its connexion with the life o prayer. Another
way of stating the prayer of quiet with ^hich we
were dealing in the preceding paragraph would be to
say that we ought to train ourselves in the use of a
Christ-centred imagination. We should spend some
moments every day, and so train ourselves to make it
habitual, in contemplating our own lives and tasks
in the light of the highest that we know, that is to
say, in the light of the Christ-life.

Here again, no doubt, we shall often find ourselves
faced by the limitations inherent in " Suggestion."
A man may be full, I suppose, of a living faith in the
sufficiency of Christ and yet not find that his faith
gives him power. This may be due to some inner
disharmony which inhibits his psychic life from
functioning freely. Or there may be some complex
like " inferiority " which partly at least discounts
the effect in advance. We can only observe here
what we have said before, that frequently some pro-
cess of analysis or some fresh struggle for self-mastery
is needed as the complement of suggestion. All the
Mystics are at one in emphasizing that only after the
stern and painful processes of " purgation " and
self-discipline can real Contemplation be experi-
enced. We should also repeat that the spiritual
receptiveness by which a complete faith becomes
possible, the liberation of, personality from the
chains and fetters of its imperfections, are them-
selves the gifts of God within the soul even as it
struggles in its search for Him. " Thou wouldest
not have been seeking for Me " to quote Pascal's
classic phrase " if thou hadst not already found
Me." We need not, I think, be afraid of this

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CHRISTIAN POWER AND RESOURCES

" circle." The facts themselves do not admit
escape from it.

But, further, as energy depends on rest, so it is
true that mental and moral power depend upon
tranquillity and confidence. One could almost say
without exaggeration that this is the " text " of
Psycho-therapeutics. Confidence is the prime factor
in personal power and moral freedom. And the
first gift of Jesus to the troubled soul is confid-
ence. Probably half the exhaustion and wear-and-
tear of our scrambling modern life is due to
worry. Think, then, how often and how refresh-
ingly, as He spoke to the " toilers weighed down
with their load," our Lord begged them not to
worry (w /xe/o^i/are). " Don't worry about food :
don't worry about clothes : there is not a man
here who by worrying can add six inches to his
height. The Heavenly Father knows : trust Him :
don't worry." But it is easy enough to tell a man
distracted and tormented by anxiety that it is
better for him not to worry. It is quite another
thing to make that advice seem anything but
cruelly ridiculous. And it is precisely that which
Jesus does for us. If one could come for the first
time to the Gospels and read the story, knowing
nothing of it, it is probable that the first impression
which would strike us as we follow Him through the
Ministry would be that of His absolutely staggering
optimism. You will never see Him quailing, how-
ever stupendous the difficulty before Him. Even
in the darkest hour of disappointment, failure and
betrayal, nothing could ever disturb His deep
serenity. He moved about calmly, quietly, majesti-

H7

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

cally, undaunted, undismayed, always certain of
Himself and of the triumph of the cause committed
to Him, And that was because of His massive
certainty in the victoriousness of God's love and
holiness. It was difficult for Him even to understand
how people could waver and worry as they did.
How is it, He would say, that you do not believe ?
How little you trust God ! It was in His presence,
under the magnetic influence of His Personality,
that it became possible for people to recover faith
in an all-sovereign holiness. Through all the ruin
and wreck of human failure, He moves about with
a joyous, radiant confidence, declaring that Satan had
fallen like lightning from Heaven, certain of man's
redemption and God's victory. Love believeth
all things, hopeth all things : and He staked His
life to prove that Love is true.

This is the gift that He offers our world to-day.
There is little in our modern Christianity compar-
able to that massive faith of His. And the moral
paralysis of the world about us is very largely trace-
able to this fact. The world we live in is politically,
socially and economically, because spiritually, bank-
rupt. It cannot recover till it recovers confidence :
it has no psychological driving-power. If we are
weak, it is because, fundamentally, we do not believe
in God as Jesus did. And this is as true, as a broad
generalization, of those within the Church as of
those without. We cannot expect to recover hope
or power till from Jesus we have recovered faith.
We must move out from our desolating subjectivism,
trusting ourselves to the guidance of His leading,
towards His triumphant and objective certainty. It

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CHRISTIAN POWER AND RESOURCES

is just the Lord Himself who makes that possibl
showing us God in the language of man's life.
" When we come out as disciples into the presence of
Jesus Christ, prepared to take Him as more modern
than any teacher of to-day, we enter a world of new
discovery of God and Man immeasurably more
wonderful and beautiful than we have ever known." l

Let us examine this twofold confidence, of faith
in human possibilities based on faith in God's
resources, as Jesus offers it to our modern world.

The antithesis of faith is fear : and it is remarkable
how many of the nervous diseases of our tired age are
described by the generic name of " phobias." In-
deed, it has been said authoritatively that if we could
banish fear from our modern life, we should free men
from half their mental ills. Fear, too, in one form
or another, is at the bottom of half men's moral
weakness. Much of the force of temptation is
added to it by the fact that we are afraid of it.
The adolescent in particular, confronted with forces
that he does not understand, often feels a real sense
of terror as he faces these unknown mysterious
dangers, which puts him from the first at a dis-
advantage. Thus to explain to him the operation
of the forces which are surging through him, to
translate him " out of darkness into light," is one of
the best ways of giving him moral courage. But
far and wide beyond this special case there are men
and women in plenty whose lives are fettered and
their moral energies imprisoned by an undefined
but haunting fear. They are afraid of life and afraid
of death : they are even half afraid of themselves.

1 Cairns in The Army and Religion, p. 443.

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

They believe that they are held in the grip of some
mysterious and ruthless forces, against which fnan
asserts himself in vain :

" Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods
They kill us for their sport."

At the heart of all this fear there is scepticism about
the character of God, and the real meaning of the
universe.

So it was with the world into which Jesus came.
It was, as one sees from the secular literature as
well as the background of the New Testament, a
world of dim superstitions, demon-haunted, a
twilight of the gods. People believed in unclean
and malign spirits constantly waiting to seize upon
and ruin them. The terror of this belief in " posses-
sion " seems often to have produced insanity, some-
times in a violent, homicidal form (Mark iv. 1-20).
He brought the light of God into this darkness.
" Have courage : don't be afraid/' He said. He
enabled them to believe in the God He shows to us,
and thus by delivering them from their fears, He
delivered them also in that act from their " demons."

It is in the spirit of this revelation that the
beautiful old legend crystallized, which tells how on
the evening of the Nativity a Greek shipmaster
steering his trading vessel through the crowded
channels of the Cyclades heard a great cry at sunset
tearing the sky, which proclaimed " Pan is dead." 1
The old religion of nature-worship, with its caprice
and its uncertainty, its cruelty and incalculable
terrors, was now made impossible for ever. Perfect

1 Gf. the famous verses beginning "The lonely mountains o'er," in
Milton's Nativity Ode.

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CHRISTIAN POWER AND RESOURCES

love had cast out fear. For Christianity lives in a
daylight world. We are not slaves, dwelling under-
ground in a world where we " know not what our
lord doeth." Minds enlightened by Greek philo-
sophy had learnt that truth is our friend. 1 Jesus,
who called Himself the Truth, has also called Himself
our Friend. Mr Bevan has recently shown in a
brilliant chapter what a sense of terror a terror
of death, and the unknown destinies of the astral
world-rulers dogged the world of Hellenistic culture
during the first two centuries of the Empire. The
demand for escape, release, redemption, chiefly con-
ceived as deliverance from this fear, was met by a
strange chaotic syncretism of high religion with
magical occultism. And the Gospel, he says, " must
have seemed such a simplification. Instead of the
enormous apparatus of mystical words and cere-
monial practices, to believe that in order to conquer
all possible terrors of the Unknown, the whole
range of ghostly enemies, one needed only to know
Jesus." a The meaning of Life had been made
manifest in Him : men's eyes had seen it, and their
hands had handled it. God had shown Himself to
men in His own reality, shining in the face of Jesus
Christ. He had given them, and gives us still in our
equally bewildered modern age, confidence towards
God.

An interesting corroboration comes to us from the
Mission-field to-day. Let me quote from Dr
Schweitzer's brilliant book. 3 " Christianity is for

1 Inge in The Legacy of Greece^ p. 85.

2 Hellenism and Christianity, p. 87.

* Schweitzer, On the Edge of the Primeval Forest, pp, 154-155.

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

him " [the negro] " the light that shines amid the
darkness of his fears. It assures him that he is iot
in the power of native spirits, ancestral spirits or
fetishes, and that no human being has any sinister
power over another, since the will of God really
controls everything that goes on in the world.

" I lay in cruel bondage,
Thou cam'st and mad'st me free."

These words of Paul Gerhardt's Advent Hymn
express better than any others what Christianity
means for primitive man. . . . Redemption through
Jesus is experienced by him as a twofold liberation :
his view of the world is purged of the previously
dominant element of fear, and it becomes ethical
instead of unethical/'

That faith we simply cannot take for granted. We
may not be so " superstitious " as the earlier ages,
but Faith is not less difficult for us. We are haunted
by the great misgiving in a world that is so evil,
how can we still believe that God is good ? I hold
that none but Christ can make this possible. He
taught, say the records, with authority, needing no
adventitious aids. He had the witness in Himself.
The irresistible conviction of the truth of God was
in His life, in that compelling love and holiness, that
life of dedicated service, by which He declared Him-
self " Master and Lord." He went about on earth,
says one, doing good. And another adds, " And we
beheld His glory, glory as of an only-begotten from
the Father." More and more it was, as a matter of
history, the experience of those jvvho came under His
spell th^t in seeing Him they had seen the Father.

CHRISTIAN POWER AND RESOURCES

The experience repeats itself still. Christ or Chaos
is the alternative which still presents itself to the
seeker for truth. Everyone longs to believe that
love is true, but only in Him is it possible to believe
it. And His death and resurrection vindicate the
faith which we dare to take from the days of His
flesh, that in Him the Eternal has drawn near to
man and manifested Love's supremacy. When we
see Jesus on the cross, wrestling in the dark alone
with all the violent realities of life, love and holiness
and faith challenging all the forces of hate and
selfishness, apparently broken by them and yet
victorious then it is possible to believe in God.
We know Him, then, in whom we have believed ;
and thus we have what the New Testament, keenly
aware by its Jewish ancestry of the difficulty of
approach to God, calls " access with boldness " unto
the Father. There is no fear in love.

But no less does the Master give us confidence in
ourselves, in Man, in the human material. Chris-
tianity is the only religion which believes in ordinary
people. It believes in them because Jesus did. It
was His teaching that those who believe in goodness
not only find it, they create it. If we forgive, it is
forgiven us : if we give, it is given to us again : if
our eye is generous and our judgment charitable,
even so men show themselves to us. The standards
by which we measure others are those by which
others measure us. We must lend, therefore,
"despairing of no one," refusing to repay injury
for injury, overcoming evil by good. And what He
taught, His whole life illustrated. There was never
one who penetrated so relentlessly behind all sham

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

and cant and insincerity into the inner secrets of
the heart. There was never one who knew*so
tragically the depth of evil of which man is capable.
But never has there been one in history who believed
so profoundly and unswervingly in the radical good-
ness of human nature and its immeasurable capa-
cities. As the supreme Believer in God, He was
also the supreme Believer in man. He trusted men
so much that He made them what they had it in
them to become. So He made unprecedented
demands and enabled people to rise to the height of
them. To very ordinary people, very limited and
rather stupid (for so the disciples confess themselves
to have been), He said quite calmly, meaning it ?
every syllable, " You are therefore to be perfect,
even as the Father in Heaven is perfect." And,
indeed, the history of Christianity is the story of
how all down the centuries He has drawn incredible
power and goodness out of commonplace men and
women.

We have quoted already Baudouin's sweeping
dictum that a man is the slave of a bad habit so long
as he thinks he is, and no longer. The most cor-
roding of all evil habits is to grow habituated to the
second-rate. There is no habit more emasculating
in its effect on the moral life than this. Jesus makes
it possible to know that the highest level is attain-
able to believe in Man as God intended him.

Most of the trouble of to-day is traceable to a
real scepticism about the capacity of human nature.
We say that there are very few great men, that the
average run of men have small capacities, that
" human nature is human nature," and that it is the

CHRISTIAN POWER AND RESOURCES

part of wisdom not to attempt to get more than one
can get out of very mediocre material. But this
makes liberty impossible and higher education a
waste of time. It is atheism expressed in practical
politics. And with this fundamental apostasy Chris-
tianity can never come to terms. We must believe
in men as much as Jesus did : He believed in them
enough to die for them. Take a man when he is
at his worst, when he has disgraced himself com-
pletely, and you despair about his reclamation, ask
yourself, How much good is there in him ? Christ
on Calvary is God's answer, " That he was worth
to God whose wheel the pitcher shaped." Chris-
tianity, then, starts, in its outlook on man's possi-
bilities, not with a problem but with a solution.
And this double confidence, in God and Man, gives
us confidence in victory. That is always the
decisive factor. " Une bataille " (as Foch was
reported to say in the dark days of 1918) " ne se
perd pas matriellement." It is all a matter of
morale. A joyous army is a victorious army. We
can enter, therefore, now, with fresh understanding
into some of Our Lord's more enigmatic sayings
which the commentaries would call " apocalyptic."
At the last hour before sentencewas passed upon Him,
standing helpless and alone before the priest, His
work a tragic failure, He looked out across the dark-
ness to the victory that must surely be and pro-
claimed its spiritual certainty : " From this time
onward there shall be the Son of Man seated on
the right hand of power and coming on the clouds
of Heaven." That is some measure of His imperial
mind.

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

So, in true spiritual descent from Him, in the
darkest hour of the Church's history, when Domitkn
sat in Augustus's seat, and the big battalions were
organized to crush out the Christian Brotherhood,
and it seemed that the Kingdom could never dawn
on earth, an old man bound in chains in a fever-
haunted quarry on a malarial island of the Archi-
pelago looked up and made his earth-shattering
proclamation : " I saw the City of God, New Jeru-
salem, coming down out of Heaven from God."
Here is the victory that overcomes the world not by
defeating the world but by triumphing in it.

The world of religion and politics to-day reminds
one of Jeremiah's haunting phrase " broken cisterns
that can hold no water." 1 The work of the Church
as the instrument of the Spirit is to fill them with
power and effective energy. And those who have
come under the influence of Jesus will see this world
not as a blank problem but as the opportunity for
God's resourcefulness. " I will give of the water
of life freely." For to be in touch with Jesus, and
to have the right to draw upon His Spirit, is to be
in touch with infinite resources. We have only to
take and spend them and take more. " The works
that I do," He said, " shall ye do also, and greater
works than these shall ye do, because I go unto the
Father," that is, Because I am with you in spiritual
power and presence always. We tap here the
deepest experiences of the Christian believer, where
no language can be adequate to express the great
fact that can only be discovered by those who will

1 Jeremiah xi. 13.

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CHRISTIAN POWER AND RESOURCES

make the venture for themselves. We can but echo
St* Paul, in his attempt, when he took words and
strained them till they broke, forcing them to say
what was in his heart : " All things are yours,
things present, things to come, life and death, all
are yours, and ye are Christ's and Christ is God's "
(i Cor. iu. 22).

157

CHAPTER VIII.

PSYCHOLOGY AND THEOLOGY.

So far, we have been mainly occupied with the
practical treatment of our subject. We have tried
to discuss the practical application of the new psycho-
logical discoveries to the development of the Christ-
ian life. It has been our aim to suggest that so
far from being (as is suspected in many Christian
quarters) antagonistic to the Christian faith. Psycho-
logy is in many of its aspects more akin to a " re-
publication " from the scientific standpoint of facts
that were known and lessons that Were taught,
and cures that were achieved " by the finger of
God " twenty centuries ago in Galilee. But there
are urgent speculative problems which we cannot
afford to leave wholly out of sight ; and I want to
devote the closing lectures to them.

It is impossible to read any recent psychological
literature without being faced by extremely dis-
turbing questions in ethics, metaphysics and theo-
logy. Indeed, it may be that many of these books
are more important and repaying for the sake of the
questions they are bound to raise in the mind of any
student of Theology than for the positive results
that they achieve. I am convinced that it is super-
ficial, and ultimately very bad philosophy, to regard
Psychology in its modern form as in any way an

PSYCHOLOGY AND THEOLOGY

effective menace to the Christian interpretation of
the % Universe. I am not at all sure, on the other
hand, that it will be found to be compatible with the
form in which that has traditionally been stated.
If not, and supposing that the hypotheses on which
Psychology is working now are tested and verified
and pronounced adequate, then the form will have
to be revised and recast in a more psychological
mould as Archbishop Temple prophesied so long
ago as I857. 1 Dr McDougall claims that he is
laying the indispensable foundation for " any future "
philosophy of History* 2 And it is a popular demand
at present that traditional Theology should be
restated in terms of the thought and language ready
to hand in the current theories of Psychology. How
far can we find here our new vocabulary for a
twentieth-century Theology ?

It would seem that the researches of psychologists
are not yet sufficiently co-ordinated, nor their con-
clusions sufficiently established to make any definite
statement possible. Yet one can see that some
traditional dogmas will have to be fairly drastically
rehandled if the truth they contain is to be made
significant. Psychology has certainly forced us to
question a good many venerable views in ethics : and
if so, the Theology of the Atonement may very
likely have new light thrown upon it. Accepted
ideas of Guilt and Responsibility 3 (i.e. in theo-
logical language Sin) will have to be considerably
revised ; and Forgiveness and its possibilities is one

1 He said we must have a new Theology " based on Psychology instead
of logic. . . . Nothing can prevent it." Quoted in Foundations, p. 226.
a The Group Mind, pp, 99-100.
* See below, Chap. IX., pp. i88jgr.

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

of the facts on which Psychology is throwing already
a searchlight of new meanings. " Salvation,- by
faith " and " salvation by works " have ceased to be
merely theological formulas : they are matters of
scientific observation. The psychology of instinct
and " release " is certainly going to help us greatly
here. Moreover, many of our traditional statements
rest upon a conception of Personality whether
human or divine which modern psychology has
made impossible, and sooner or later will have to
be reformulated. Possibly, too, as the Bishop of
Manchester has been frequently suggesting lately,
the crucial problem of Christology, that is, of our
Lord's divine-human Nature, may find some line
leading towards the truth in psychological investiga-
tions.

These questions are too far-reaching and too deli-
cate to be discussed in the course of half a chapter.
They require a vast amount of research, and far
more time and thought than is now available. I
hope to be able to tackle them later on. Here I
confine myself to the broader issue. And it is, I
think, undeniably the case that the first sensation
of the student when introduced to the New Psycho-
logy is that the ground is shaking beneath his feet.
A great many of his rough-and-ready theories, and
some of his fundamental beliefs and concepts, seem
to be undermined and tottering. If mind and will
are not what he thought they are ; if freedom and
guilt and moral responsibility are less clear-cut ideas
than he had supposed ; if even Personality itself is
so nebulous and elusive a conception ; some of his
strongest positions begin to give way. He feels the

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PSYCHOLOGY AND THEOLOGY

subject must be dangerous and likely to subvert the
Christian faith. May it not even cast doubt in the
end on the very reality of God ? It is to this main
problem that I wish to devote this and the following
lecture.

But the thoughtful reader is not alone in this
theological bewilderment. Psychology has become
popularized more rapidly than any science pre-
viously. Enormous numbers of people are now
familiar with some of the more popular text-books,
at first hand or through the medium of the Press.
And there is in consequence a vague impression
which would appear to be rapidly gaining ground
that the new psychological discoveries have some-
how put Christianity out of date. And some of the
most important current bpoks take for granted as
needing no discussion that men will now explain
as auto-suggestion or the projection of the social or
other instincts what our unenlightened ancestors
called God.

This is a challenge we cannot afford to shirk. The
really urgent problem of to-day, as Kirsopp Lake
foretold in 1914 l is

" concerned with the question, What is
religion ? And the opposing propositions
will be (i) that religion is the communion
of man in the sphere of subliminal conscious-
ness with some other being higher than him-
self, and (2) that It is the communion of
man with his own subliminal consciousness
which he does not recognize as his own,

1 The Earlier Epistles of St Paul, pp. 251, 253.

IOI L

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOG

but hypostatizes as someone exterior to
himself."

If the second of these alternatives is true, it is
merely waste of time to go on discussing the bearing
of the New Psychology on the interpretations
of Theology. There will be no more Theology
to discuss. Even the equable and broad-minded
Theism of our post-war speculations would probably
still be prepared to admit, if challenged, that
Theology means " thinking about God." However
pleasant and tonic an exercize self-communion with
oneself may be and all of us know, within limits,
that it is so emphatically it just is not religion as
it is known to any religious man. Our Lord once
told a story about a Pharisee who mistook self-
communing for prayer : " The Pharisee stood and
prayed with himself" (St Luke xviii. n). We
are not encouraged to follow his example. This
theory means that God is a mistake.

Let there be no obscuring of the issue. If this
theory is true (i.e. if God is only a " projection,"
of your own consciousness or that of your group),
it isn't merely a question of defending the minutiae of
Christian orthodoxy. It is a question of whether
any longer one can honestly maintain the possi-
bility of any real religion whatsoever.

Dr Pratt has put this with refreshing candour:
" That meditation may have excellent subjective
effects is not to be denied, but no one with any
knowledge of the psychology of religion will claim
for it, an influence equal to that which results from
the earnest prayer of the man with faith. . . . For

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PSYCHOLOGY AND THEOLOGY

since the subjective value of prayer is chiefly due
to the belief that prayer has values which are not
subjective, it will with most persons evaporate
altogether once they learn that it is all subjective.
Hence, if it be true both that the subjective value of
prayer is very great, and also that this is the only
value which prayer possesses, this latter fact should
be assiduously kept secret. . . . No, if the sub-
jective value of prayer be all the value it has, we
wise psychologists of religion had best keep the fact
to ourselves ; otherwise the game will soon be up
and we shall have no religion left to psychologize
about. We shall have killed the goose that laid our
golden egg." 1

Now, as we seek to face up to this question, the
lesson of the eighteen-fifties is full of warning and
encouragement. The tragic and quite needless
conflict between Science and Theology which has
left both combatants still scarred and mutilated
arose from a closely parallel situation. Religion and
Science both behaved illegally. Each violated the
frontier of the other. In the excitement and
intoxication of the new biological discoveries,
Science invaded the territory of Theology. " Evolu-
tion " was not, of course, discovered then ; the
theory is as old as the Greek thinkers. But the work
of Darwin brought it prominently before the mind
of the general public, and his special theory of
natural selection, throwing an emphasis (which more
recent work in this field tends to regard as exagger-
ated) on environment as the decisive factor, made
the step to " materialism " easy. The demonstra-

1 Pratt, The Religious Consciousness > pp. 335-336.
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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

tion of the continuity of human life with our pre-
human ancestry was enough to turn the head of a
generation brought up to regard the old creation-
legends as literal statements of scientific fact. It
did so. But it turned them the wrong way round.
Men hastened to assure Theology that the so-called
special creation theory was no longer borne out by
the facts. That was quite true : Paley was obsolete.
But they also leapt to the really insane conclusion
that there was now no room left in the Universe for
any mind or will or conscious purpose. Theology
was forced to retaliate, and scored a bull's-eye on
the wrong target. Instead of adjusting itself to the
new facts, which would have been the right defensive
movement by taking an offensive on its own, it
simply declared with monotonous iteration that the
new facts were not true. The struggle raged round
issues which to us seem strangely antiquated and
unreal : indeed, we can see now that this bitter war
was one without any genuine casus belli. And both
the combatants have been left the poorer. Science,
having banished consciousness, was left with a
barren mechanistic theory which soon proved useless
even for its own business, and is now almost univer-
sally discarded. Theology, by refusing to face new
facts, identified itself with obscurantism, and lost
its hold on the educated world. But each of them
would have vastly enriched the other if each had not
usurped the other's functions. Science claimed to
interpret the facts of experience which is the proper
function of Philosophy : Theology tried to control
or conceal facts which it is the task of Science to
discover. This tragedy must not be repeated now.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND THEOLOGY

The advance of man's knowledge of the physical
world between the fifteenth and seventeenth
centuries was largely due to a clear delimitation
of the different spheres and provinces of study.
Magnificent as everyone must feel the attempt of
Scholasticism to have been the attempt to control
in the interests of Theology all the provinces of the
human mind it proved in the end a fatal obstacle
to any progress in clear thinking. Science had to
break free of Theology, claiming autonomy for its
own researches. " Final causes " had to be ignored, 1
Only so could Science become scientific and discover
and verify the actual facts. But Science ceases to
be scientific the moment it passes outside its own
province, and seeks to give explanations of its facts.
Then it is actually impeding knowledge, and attempt-
ing to impose on others the tyranny from which it
had freed itself.

There are thus two entirely distinct questions
which must never be allowed to become confused.
The first is, How as a matter of fact do things happen ?
That is the business of Science to discover. The
second is, Why do things happen so ? That is the
business of Philosophy (or Theology) to try to
explain. All advance in knowledge, and all clear
thinking, depend on keeping these two inquiries
separate. Much of the trouble at the present time
seems to be due to their having become confused.

The heady and premature dogmatism with which
the science of the physical world rushed to the
destruction of religion is closely paralleled at the
present day. So soon as Science, within certain

1 Bacon, Novum Organum, I. 65, 89.

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

limits, began to discover how the world was made, it
declared that therefore God did not make it.* It
was a wholly illogical conclusion. But psychology,
in its new enthusiasm, is in danger of repeating that
mistake. Knowing, again within certain narrow
limits, the laws of the working of the human mind,
it is tempted to say that therefore God did not make
them. Certain modern psychologists, indeed, claim
to have superseded God exactly as did the physical
sciences. So Freud preposterously claims that what
has been hitherto called metaphysics must in future
be known as a metapsychology." l He has explained
away the " myth of God." One seems to have
heard the same claim made before, by the cruder
forms of " Comparative Religion." There was, at
one time, a curious argument that, because every-
where, in all levels of culture, mankind is found to
have been religious, and all religions show at first
appearance certain superficial resemblances, there-
fore all religion is untrue. There was also the era
of the " solar-myth " now so decisively discredited,
which was used to intimidate very nervous Christians.
More recent researches have opened up the second-
ary, underground religions of the earlier Mediter-
ranean culture over which the " Olympian " wor-
ships were imposed. We know a good deal about
" mystery-religions " in the Graeco-Oriental world,
and their supposed points of contact with Chris-
tianity are sometimes exploited to discredit the
latter. There is a school which seeks to " explain "
Christianity as a sort of precipitate formed by the

1 Psychopathology of Everyday Life (E.T.)i p, 309. But what is
the word supposed to mean ?

1 66

PSYCHOLOGY AND THEOLOGY

fusion of Judaism with these old-world faiths.
The attempt, I think, is quite unsuccessful, and I
doubt if critical investigation even concedes a very-
far-reaching influence on Christianity to the mystery-
cults. But, even if we go the whole length in
regarding the " catholic " form of Christianity as
the inheritor of these ancient worships, that would
not in itself cast any doubt on the validity of the
experience which all religions seek to mediate.
Religion, says Lake, lives by the death of religions :
and obviously the findings of Anthropology and
Comparative Religion have modified the pre-
scientific attitude to the " gods of the heathen " as
though they were " but idols." But to recognize
how religions have developed does not in itself
demonstrate their falsity. The religious experience
of the human race is a permanent factor in all its
history, and all History must take account of it.
So much, we thought, was everywhere conceded.

But psychology has opened a new approach to the
business of eliminating God. It attaches, as any
science is bound to do which studies the facts of
human consciousness, fundamental importance to
religion. It does not question its subjective value :
but some of its exponents argue that religion has no
other value, that there is nothing " at the other end."
So they have, in effect, revived the old idea of the
non-religious origin of religion to disprove the
existence of the God it worships. Hunger and lust,
said the old " materialism," sufficiently explain all
man's activities. Certain psychologists take this very
seriously, and regard the whole apparatus of Religion
as a projection into symbolic form of the primary

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

instinctive Impulses. It is easy to make great play
with the sex-instinct, and it is a fashionable theory
now that the religions of men are " eroto-genetic,"
that is, sexual in their origin. So, with character-
istic thoroughness, Freud and Jung are anxious to
assure us. All the creeds and cultures of Religion
in their bewilderingly varied forms, can be traced
to a common source and spring. They are all
symbolic phantasy-images of the developing sex-life
of the race. The most elaborate treatment of this
matter with which I am personally acquainted is in
Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious. There, all
religion, all poetry and folklore, all the myths of
the dying Saviour-gods (including, of course, the
Christian version of them) all the imagery of art
and poetry from the " QEdipus " down to Paul
Verlaine, are pressed into the service of this theory.
They are symbolic phantasies of life passing through
its storms to independence : and, like the primrose,
they are nothing more. This theory, as a matter of
psychology, lays itself open (I think) to destructive
criticism. It has been examined in a brilliant
Essay by the late Dr Rivers, published after his
lamented death. 1 Rivers' work was tending em-
phatically to discredit the basis on which much
popular Anthropology rests. He establishes that
the similarities found in religion and social custom
in such widely scattered geographical areas, are not
due, as was commonly assumed, to the uniformity of

1 "The Aims of Ethnology " in Psyche, Oct. 22, pp. 118-132. This
Essay is to appear in Psychology and Ethnology. Dr Elliott-Smith's
article, in the same number, forecasts his own book, The Psychology of
Myths. Unfortunately neither of these books have been published at
the time of my going to press.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND THEOLOGY

the constitution of the human mind, so that, " given
similar conditions . . . the same modes of thought
and* behaviour come into existence independently."
They are almost certainly due to transmission from
some common centre of origin. If so, a great deal
of loose, popular thought about " evolution,"
" spontaneous generation " and the like, in con-
nexion with religious origins, and especially the use
that Freud has made of them, are at least danger-
ously discredited. Indeed, one of Rivers' coadjutors,
Professor Elliott-Smith, roundly asserts that Freud
and Jung have no ground left to stand upon. " The
new teaching in ethnology," he claims, in introducing
Rivers' article, " destroys the foundation of the
belief in the reality of ' typical symbols ' and brings
to the ground the fantastic speculations built upon
it by Freud and Jung." l

It sounds convincing : but we must wait develop-
ments. Meanwhile, I am only concerned here to
point out the tendency of biological psychology to
explain away the " myth of God " as a rationalization
of the instincts.

The emphasis is not always on the sex-life. A
similar and, at first sight, more plausible theory, has
been woven round the social instinct. Whether in
the less sophisticated form of the ordinary writers
on Social Psychology, or in the more elaborate
hypotheses of the " Group- theory " of religion asso-
ciated with the work of Durkheim, 2 the sugges-
tion is that the Deity men worship is but the spirit

1 Psyche, ib., p. 115.

8 This has been critically examined by Professor Webb in his Group
Theories of Religion. There was a good paper on the eroto-genetic
theory by Mr Thouless in Psyche, Oct. 1921.

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

of their social group externalized as a Power who
claims their loyalty. These different theories are
all agreed in this, that, by an examination of religion,
they seek to eliminate its Object. Our business, at
present, is not to examine in detail or try to refute
these various hypotheses, but to discuss as a matter of
logical method the procedure by which they arrive
at their conclusions. It is not very difficult to show
that they argue by fallacious reasoning.

Now it is important, at this stage, not to overstate
our case. For every student is plainly bound to
recognize the extent to which these elemental
factors have entered into the growth of the different
religions. That is a simple matter of known fact.
It is plain enough that religious origins run back into
social origins : for man is a social and religious
creature. It is clear that dance and song and cere-
monial have a large element of sex-life in them, that
taboo is of partly biological origin. Thus the world-
wide myth of the Vegetation-God, always dying and
always rising again, does reflect the profound needs
and experiences of the primitive life of early culture.
It is clear that elements in the Christian culture can
be traced back to dim and bloody origins. It is
probable that Psychology will lead us here and there
to question the records of supposed events. There is
nothing whatever to gain from obscuring this. Nor
can one see what value religion could have if it
did not offer a genuine satisfaction to the primal
needs of the human race. But it seems to me to be
little short of childish to suppose that such study of
the more primitive elements which are taken up into
all the higher religions, proves, eo ipso, that there is

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no God ! As well suppose that to trace the long
process by which natural science has moved out from
the superstitious magic of its beginnings to its
magnificent present-day achievements, proves that
the world it examines is illusory. This is the
argument which, in all solemnity, is applied by some
psychological investigators to the Object which
religion has ever sought. In other words, we can
recognize in this tendency a new form of the fallacy
which confuses " origin " with " validity." The
ground has shifted from the old-fashioned " materi-
alism " to a consuming interest in psychology. But,
though we call nowadays for a different piper,
we find that he often plays the same old tune. The
methods of Science have undergone a change. Its
dominant categories to-day are not as for the
Victorians mechanistic : it works in terms of
energy, life and purpose. But, though its premises
have altered, it argues to a similar conclusion. The
older Science, starting from physical facts, said that
mind was a by-product of matter. (The technical
word was epi-phenomenon.) In our day there are
students of psychic or mental facts who maintain
that God is a by-product of mind.

But both conclusions are equally illegitimate ; for
both ignore the line of demarcation between Science
and Philosophy. A good example of how that real
distinction should affect psychological investigation
is afforded by a recent examination by Dr Mitchell
of the light thrown by psycho-analysis on the
recorded facts of Spiritism. Dr Mitchell establishes
the possibility (which Baudouin reached along a
different line) that the " control " with which

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

mediums claim intercourse may be their own
" secondary " (dissociated) personalities. But <you
cannot conclude from that (even if it were proved)
that the knowledge they claim to obtain is mere
delusion. Because, as he says, there are two quite
separate problems :

1. The actual mechanism of mediumship, which

it Is for psychology to describe ; and

2. The source of the supernormal knowledge

which the mediums do undoubtedly obtain.
That is for metaphysics to explain. 1

It will be seen that this is closely parallel to the
problem raised by Dr Kirsopp Lake, and suggests
at once the right method of approach. Psychology
must supply us with the facts about the human
mind and its experiences, of which the religious
experience is one. It is then the task of Theology
to explain what kind of Universe it is in which such
experiences occur i.e. in the end to ask, What is
God like ? But Science must not beg the question
before it asks Theology to answer it. Because we
begin to know how things are done, we cannot
simply assume that God doesn't do them.

God may, for example, work through the mental
machinery disclosed by the laws of suggestion and
auto-suggestion : we have seen that Christ, in
effect, taught that He does so. But it is neither
science nor philosophy to assume that this proves
that God does not exist ! Again, that belief in
God is a psychological necessity if the mind is to be
fully unified we have ourselves emphatically affirmed

1 Psychic Research Quarterly, July 1920. (Now called Psyche.)

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PSYCHOLOGY AND THEOLOGY

(p. 71), No doubt to describe the psychological
history of a belief is not the same thing as to prove the
belief is true though Cardinal Newman tended to
think it was. But neither is it, on the other hand, a
clear proof that the belief is false. 1 The psycholo-
gical necessity may be itself an expression of that fact
which is recognized in the belief in God.

We shall, therefore, be ready to receive and wel-
come whatever new facts Psychology has to teach us ;
and if these new facts should seriously affect any
traditional assertions of Theology, we must be
prepared to revise our Theology in accordance with
new revelations of truth. But if Psychology goes
further, and claims to supersede Theology and
reign as monarch in a godless world, we shall do
well to remember the earlier parallels, and confine
ourselves to a more scientific course.

1 As Tansley (pp. 135-138) assumes.

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CHAPTER IX.

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH.

BUT Christian Theology need not be content to stand
thus cautiously on the defensive. We can do some-
thing far more enterprising. For it can, I believe,
be fairly and honestly argued that the facts with
which psychology is occupied, and the methods
which psycho-therapy employs, really presuppose,
as their own postulate, the Christian interpretation
of the Universe, and will only " work " if that is
assumed to be true. " Suggestion points inevitably
beyond itself towards Faith as its ultimate goal." l
We have already shown that psycho-therapy is at
least compatible with Christianity. I make bold to
suggest now that it will only work on the Christian
hypothesis. That is, that unless the Christian faith
is true, psycho-therapy itself collapses. Psychology
presents you with a problem which has no solution
apart from Christianity. Without God it will
simply not make sense. Unless we start with God
we shall get nowhere.

Psychology has a very great deal to tell us about the
restoration of personality, making us one, giving us
free self-expression by the removal of obstructive
forces. But by what possible right does psychology
speak of " self " or " personality " at all ? Which
of our many " selves " are we to express ? It is

1 W. Brown, op. cit., p. 123.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

tacitly taking something for granted here which it
cannot deduce from its own subject-matter. It is
assuming that we have already a knowledge of the
ideal of Personality to which to conform the indi-
vidual life. But we have not, from psychology alone.
It is an idea brought in from elsewhere. If we move
on the strictly psychological level, we have merely a
chaos of " complexes " and impulses, each of which
may claim to be the man in extreme cases several of
them do so fragmentary, unco-ordinated, fighting
trucelessly but without decision, competing with one
another for expression. And that is all that we
have the right to know if we have psychology for
our only guide. There is no hope for them of
integration into concrete, living Personality. I
cannot see that we have any real right to speak
of Personality at all. The more we know of the
deep unconscious belt which surrounds the narrow
strip of waking consciousness, the more we are
able to trace the flaws and fissures which run
across the bed of our psychic life, isolating parts
of our conscious selves like fauna stranded in un-
inhabited islands, the less possible does it become to
take what we call personality for granted. Are we
" one " or are we " many " ? The old question of
the Greek philosophers confronts us now again with
added force. There is nothing in the facts them-
selves to show. It sometimes seems as though
psycho-therapeutics were faced with the spectacle
of Humpty-Dumpty a tragic heap of fragmentary
egg-shells. And :

" All the king's horses, and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty-Dumpty together again"
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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

unless they knew he was meant to be an egg. But
we cannot tell that by looking at the shells. That is,
psychology is bound to start to use the technical
language of philosophy- with an a priori judgment
about the existence and meaning of Personality.
It is bound to assume that there is such a thing as a
single and unified personal life, In which the con-
flicts and discords of the individual subject can be
reconciled. Each of the subjects A, B and C must
have an " ideal " personality to which his life ought
to be conformed. But that inevitable assumption
at once drives you a step further back. How can
there be an intelligible ideal for an unlimited number
of different selves unless there be a Perfect Per-
sonality, ground and archetype of the different
selves, of the nature of which A, B and C partake ?
All the objections against radical " pluralism " bear
with full force on this point. It is impossible to say
that there is an ideal life for each unless there is an
ideal life for all. Thus there must be, in the nature
of Reality, some fixed ideal and goal of personal life
before you can have any warrant for assuming that
there is an ideal life for the individual. But an
ideal of personality cannot be other than personal
itself. And if it is an ideal for all persons, it cannot
be one person among others : it must be a perfect
all-including life from which all other persons derive
their meaning. We must therefore start with the
recognition of God as the pre-condition of perfected
human life. Without the fundamental assumption
the starting-point of Religion and Theology, at
any rate in the Christian forms we know of Per-
sonality at the back of things, there is no possibility

176

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH.

of constructive thinking. You are simply left with
a lift of insoluble problems. It is, I submit, in-
creasingly forced upon us that no attempt at healing
personality is scientifically possible, and no talk about
personality at all is logically justifiable, unless there
is Personality behind the Universe. On no other
terms will psychology make sense. Belief in a
personal God, the source and archetype of our finite
personal consciousness is the only real guarantee
there is for human " personality " at all.
As Prof. Webb finely says, in another connexion :

" Without that affirmation the confident
assertion of man's greatness is apt to echo
among the desolate spaces of a Universe
wherein this evanescent Personality seems
to count for nothing, like the voice of a child
shouting to keep his courage up among
mountain solitudes by night." l

Thus it turns out that the very interpretation
which some psychologists claim to have made
obsolete the faith in God or Perfect Personality
as the very meaning of the Universe must be
brought back as a necessary assumption before
Psychology can itself " make sense." The Per-
sonality of God is the condition of solving the
problems which are dealt with by Psychology.

People often ask us to prove our faith in God. It
cannot be done. It is just like asking us to prove
there is such a thing as Truth. You cannot, of
course ; because unless there is, on what grounds
can it be claimed that your proof is true ? You cannot

* C. J, Webb, God and Human Personality, p. 168.

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

start thinking without some assumptions ; you must
assume that there is Truth to be known (i.e. that
the world is more than a lunatic asylum), and that
human minds can know it (i.e. that not all of us are
lunatics). And every piece of successful thinking,
as well as every instance of right action, go to con-
firm the rightness of your assumption. Even in
purely intellectual questions there must be an initial
act of faith. The more sense you manage to make
of the Universe on the basis of that first assumption,
the more it is shown to have been justified. It is'
different only In the sense that the issues involved
are more far-reaching and tremendous with the
alleged " proof " of God's existence. It is a venture
which all advance in knowledge, and all success in
the art of living rightly, shows to be justified and,
indeed, inevitable. So here, we have shown, I
think, that if we start with the faith in a Personal
God to explain the Universe, psychology makes
sense ; but not without it. That is, so far as it
goes, a positive result for the theologian.

But, if we get so far, the inner necessity of the
argument itself is bound to take us at least one step
further. Not merely Theism seems to be de-
manded before psychology can do its work, but
something very much like Christian Theism.

Our argument, so far, seems to have demanded as
the very condition of our self-hood a Perfect Per-
sonality at the heart of things, standing over against
our finiteness as fully and completely personal. In
this sense, God must be, as we say, transcendent
Other than we, the Source and Ground of ourselves,
perfect by contrast with our imperfection. But if

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CHRISTIAN FA1TB

we stop there it is merely a logical fact, of no really
practical importance. For even if we know that
there exists somehow and somewhere a Perfect
Personality, to try and become like Him is absurd.
Perfect Personality, as Lotze said, is in God only.
But that leads rather to despair than hope. There is
a great gulf fixed and who can bridge it ? God
must do it or it cannot be done. That is to say,
that God must be within us, Himself the Bridge
that leads from earth to heaven, leading us back
again to His own perfection, expressing Himself
through human personality. And here we touch
the root of the whole question the real basis of all
that we have been saying. The spacious creed of
Christianity offers a satisfying solution here.

It is striking how the best recent philosophy is
increasingly emphasizing this conception. It is
true that some of the old credal statements, and some
of the language of our Prayer-book, tend to suggest a
Divine transcendence which is self-centred and self-
complete, wholly removed from the life of finite
persons. But this breaks down, since it will not
satisfactorily explain our own deepest experiences.
" The essence of human nature/' as Professor
Pringle-Pattison has put it, " is just . . . the con-
trast between the actual present and the unrealized
future, passing into the deeper contrast between the
* is ' and the 4 ought-to-be, 5 and the duality of what
is commonly called the lower and the higher self,
with the discord and the struggle thence resulting.
The process of such a life is explicable only through the
actual presence within it, or to it, of the Perfection to
which it aspires . . . Transcendence . , . refers to a

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

distinction of value or quality, not to the onto-
logical separateness of one being from another. . . .
The Productive Reason remains at once the sustain-
ing element of the dependent life, and the living
content continually offering itself to the soul which
it has awakened to the knowledge and quest of
itself." l

We can reach the same point from another line of
approach. The investigation of psycho-neuroses,
and, indeed, nearly all the study of psychology is
concerned in a greater or a less degree with abnor-
malities in the human mind. It aims, as we have
noticed a moment ago, at unifying personality at
making people what they are meant to be. But
how do we know what they are meant to be ?
" No one," says Dr Brown, " is completely normal." *
We can give full value to individual freedom ; we can
shrink from forcing a standardized mould on to any
other personality, leaving it free " to develop along
its own lines." But, even so, there must be some
standard of reference. For progress presupposes a
fixed goal. You cannot try to " develop " per-
sonality unless you know towards what it should
develop. A completely practical need thus corre-
sponds here with what we have urged to be logical
necessity. We must have an objective standard of
personality.

Now Christians claim, and nearly all men would
admit, that the most complete expression of per-
sonality which can be found in the records of our
race, is the character of Jesus of Nazareth. But
this perfect human Personality was, so the Christian

1 Th* Idea of God, pp. 254-255 (my italics). a Op. cit.> p. 96.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

consciousness asserts, the highest manifestation in

human history of the archetypal Personality. He

was " the effulgence of God's glory and the very

portrait of His Character. 5 ' l That is to say,

that in His human character the personal Being of

God is realized under the conditions of time and

space. But this Personality would have no signifi-

cance for the thought or the moral strivings of man-

kind unless it were indeed the manifestation of the

God of Nature the Ground of the natural order.

Otherwise, He but mocks our aspirations ; for

otherwise, this perfected human character has no

roots in the deepest structure of Reality. That

conviction the Christian Church asserts in the

famous " Homo-ousion." Christ, it says, is " of

one Essence " with the Father. That is to say, His

perfect Personality is the expression and the guar-

antee of the Reality behind the Universe. Only in

a real Incarnation have we a truly " normal "

Personality.

Here, then, we reach a conception of Personality
which satisfies psychological requirements as well as
philosophical necessity. We do not blur the real
distinction between the conditioned and the infinite.
We do not, with " absolute idealism," hold that
God is exhausted in His world, or obliterate the
possibility, on which all genuine religion rests,
of intercourse between finite personalities and the
perfect God by whom they were created and upon
whose will their existence is dependent. On all

1 Heb. i. 3, dubr r??s tiTrocrrdo-ews. I think this a fair translation, for
although the thought-forms of Greek Philosophy had no room for person-
ality in our sense, yet " hypostasis " means " What makes God, God."

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CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

this, rather, we throw the stronger emphasis. But
we claim that, in moral and spiritual union with the
perfect Being of God, Jesus has shown as no other
before or since, the real meaning of human per-
sonality the personality which is truly normal.
This accords with the whole Christian world-view,
which holds that the natural only becomes itself
only realizes its own nature fully when it is
permeated by the supernatural.

If this be admitted, it takes us a long way. I will
try to sketch now in the barest outline how Christian
thought would work out the development which
follows from this conception of personality, which
alone seems to satisfy the demands we have made.

Anyone listening to the previous lectures may
possibly have been raising one objection which is
perfectly fair, and ought to be fairly met. It may
have seemed as though I were suggesting that the
problem in the lives of all of us were primarily one
of self-direction. It may have seemed as though I
conceived religion as just an activity of the human
will, a deliberate setting of ourselves towards the
attainment of an ideal purpose. That is really the
negation of religion ; it is the last position I would
defend. It assumes that we are " Captains of our
souls " which all of us know to our cost that we
are not. If what Theology calls Pelagianism
" you can be good if you will " were a true state-
ment, the problem of life would be simpler than it is.
Everyone realizes how inadequately this position
describes the horrid facts. Even supposing it were
true, we have still to discover what can make us
will. But, apart from that, we shall all, I suppose,

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PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

agree that any suggestion that the spring or origin
of the religious life can be found in any motives of
our own is In flagrant contradiction to the deepest
experiences of religion. It is clear, at any rate,
that for a Christian, the very perception of a divine
ideal is due to the work of God within the soul.
" Thou wouldest not have been seeking for Me, if
thou hadst not already found Me." It is the
influence of Christ upon us that is, the working
of His Spirit In us that makes us desire to follow
His example. So that the vision of the Kingdom
of God in any way which affects our desires and wills
is itself the gift or " grace " of God. The presence
of the Spirit has been presupposed in every line of
our discussion, which will only " work " if this is a
real fact.

A religion that is merely an attempt, however
noble, at reaching an ideal, must be a religion of
impotent despair. The Stoics were quite logical
in adding suicide as the practical culmination of
their system. But Christianity cannot be described
as the pursuit of an ideal : it is rather an ideal
pursuing us. It is a City coming down from
Heaven the Word made flesh, and dwelling among
men. The whole hope and genius of Christianity
as a redemption of our wills and instincts depends
entirely on the Incarnation. God took upon Him-
self man to deliver him, clothed Himself in concrete
human nature, physical and psychological, to make it
the instrument of His own perfection.

It goes without saying that an Incarnation is only
possible if man is, from the first, made " in the image
of God." What we are by nature always has been

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f CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

divine, in the sense that we are made for God.
Our instincts come from God : they are God's g\ft :
it is " natural " for them to be sublimated in pro-
gressively moral and spiritual activities. God is the
innermost core of our personal selves, the best we
have in us to become, and we are ourselves when we
are most like God. We attain the true goal of our
life only when God is expressing Himself through
us ; and this in no nebulous pantheistic sense. God
expresses Himself through human life when there
is a real moral union between our human desires and
wills and His : when the influence of His Spirit in
us has so purified and hallowed our impulses and
desires that we will what He wills. Then our
actions express the life of God.

" Our wills are ours to make them thine " ; and
only then are they truly our own.

The Incarnation makes this possible. For, if we
follow the lines we have laid down previously, we
shall hold that the very essence of personality is the
continuity of purpose. It is purpose (or will) that
makes a man one, not many. And the " character "
of a man verifies itself in the dominant purpose
which gives his life its unity. We are bound to hold
that in symbol and analogy this is also true of the
Divine life, so that the revelation of God's purpose
is the revelation of God's character. Jesus revealed
the character of God by His manifestation of the
Father's purpose. " The Son does nothing of
Himself but whatsoever He sees the Father doing."
In Him we behold the will of God in action. He,
then, that has seen Him has seen the Father. It is
perfectly true, as the Catholic Church maintains,

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PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

that our Lord was God, living a human life. In
that perfect union of will with the Father's will,
caused by God's initiative act when Jesus was con-
ceived by the Holy Ghost, revealing deeper reaches in
God's purposes as the Boy " grew in wisdom and in
stature," God expressed Himself through a Man's
life. And henceforth, for us Christians, " the Voice
of God within us speaks in the tones of Jesus of
Nazareth." l

But this is no mere event in history : it is the
supreme contemporary Fact. All those who yield
to the influence of Jesus are " given the right to
become the sons of God " to share, in their
measure and degree, the purpose and so the life of
the Heavenly Father. The acceptance of this gift
is eternal life. " He became man " as the early
Christian thinkers did not hesitate to say " in
order that man might become divine." It is
possible that the Greeks who used this phrase thought
of it as implying a change of essence a passing from
" corruptible " mortality into the " incorruptible
essence " of Deity. For us, the interpretation will
be different. It must needs be moral rather than
metaphysical. We can think of it, probably, only
in terms of purpose. Yet their magnificent claim
does remain valid. The Incarnation was quite
definitely an irruption of supernatural life into the
field of human personality " taking Manhood into
God " that the wills and faculties which were
made for God should return to that perfection from
which they came. This is the spirit of Leo's great
prayer : " Let the whole world see that things

1 Inge's Outspoken Essays, Second Series, p. 54.

185

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

which were cast down are being raised up, that
things which had grown old are being made Hw,
and that all things are returning to perfection
through Him from whom they took their origin/'
It is also the spirit of the Lord's own prayer : Our
Father, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven ;
may the Perfection which God is eternally, be
realized in the temporal life of men.

We have here, I think, the most promising
approach towards a satisfying Christology. But
also we can see, very clearly, how the doctrine
of the Incarnation, thus brought into touch with
psychological facts, works itself out in the teaching
of the Church.

Let us recall at this point an important fact to
which reference was made in an earlier lecture that
instincts which, in themselves, are self-destructive,
are harmonized and raised to their highest power
when they are directed to a social end. " The
greatest and permanent power comes to him who
uses it not for his own personal ends, but for the
good of his fellows ; for only by such a use of it does
he achieve the maximum inner harmony." *

We remember then, with perhaps new under-
standing, that the goal of Christian life (whenever
Christian thought has remained true to its own
special genius) has always been held to be incorpora-
tion into a Fellowship of the Spirit, who is the
Spirit of Incarnate God. The Spirit always creates
Fellowship ; the activities of the Spirit are social
activities ; the decisive moment of Pentecost^ for
example, brought to birth for the first time in human

A Dr Hadfield (" Psychology of Power ") in The Spirit, p. 94,

186

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

history the ideal expression of human social life.
The Divine life expresses itself in Fellowship. We
live, says psychology, at the highest level of power
and freedom and effectiveness when we are most
completely socialized. We become ourselves, says
Christianity, when we are caught up into a Divine
Society the perfect expression of Him " who
altogether in all men is coming to His fulfilment "
(Eph. i. 23). That is the true goal and consumma-
tion of the social instinct which for countless aeons
has been driving us down the ways of history,
modifying and in part controlling the operation of
all our other instincts, guiding the racial life without
its knowledge, and some of us definitely against our
will, into that which man is meant to be as the son
and the image of God who is perfect Fellowship
the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.

The difference between our modern Christian
outlook and that of New Testament Christianity
is nowhere seen more strikingly than in this. We
tend to think in terms of individual Christians, and
ask how we are to draw them into Fellowship. That
is partly an inheritance from the break-up of the Holy
Roman Empire, and the reaction which caused the
Reformation. But it is miles away from the New
Testament, which thinks almost entirely in social
terms. An individual Christian is, to it, the Fellow-
ship living at that "growing point." Salvation
is thought of in terms of the Fellowship. The
fulfilment of the Christ is conceived as possible not
in tke individual but in the life of the completed
Fellowship. The deeper intuitions of Christianity
are thus significantly in accord with the science of

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

our more modern age. May we not here begin
to see a glimpse of what it is that the Church,, has
really meant by professing its belief in a Holy Spirit
the " Giver of life " and Power, and the Spirit of
Fellowship ? Power and Fellowship, perhaps, are
one. The love of God, the influence of Christ, the
Fellowship created by the Spirit (2 Cor. xiii. 14)
are not these the very axioms underlying the whole
of our inquiry ?

I can do no more here than throw out this hint ;
but it will, I believe, be found in a little while
when the facts are established a little more securely,
and Christian thought has had time to get to work
on th^m, that psychology (and especially social
psychology) will supply us with the data and the
vocabulary for a true theology of the Holy Spirit. So
far, it has been appallingly neglected, and most of
our teaching on this vital matter is lamentably arid
and conventional. Nowhere is " restatement "
more imperative.

Another point at which Christianity, by its belief
in an Incarnation, offers a very definite contribution,
is where it touches the terribly tangled problem of
what is popularly called free-will.

It is often vehemently asserted, by Freud, for
example, and his English followers, that the myth
of free-will has been finally exploded by the scientific
treatment of mental processes. But this appears
to be unwarrantable. Obviously, if psychology
aspires to be a science among sciences it is bound to
proceed by scientific methods. Scientific research
becomes impossible without the postulate of cause
and effect or, better, consequent and antecedent.

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PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH*

Once acLmit an event which has no cause, and there
is aij. end of the scientist's inquiry. It is thus from
the very start inevitable, as a question of scientific
procedure, for the psychologist to assume that, for
every event in the mental life which is the subject of
his researches, there is to be found an antecedent to
which the event concerned can be traced. No
fruitful work can be done on other terms. But, as
Professor Sorley has pointed out, to establish a
causal connexion in this way between the successive
states of my consciousness, does not really touch the
problem of freedom. For the psychologist they are
" mental states " : but for me they are my mental
states, and a whole Philosophy is involved in that.
They are different intrinsically from your or any
one else's mental states, just because I am I, and
you are you. In other words, the necessary postu-
late that each state depends on one preceding it,
does not in any vital way affect the freedom of the
essential inner self. Science is bound to work by
abstraction : but in living fact there is really no such
thing as a mental state considered in abstraction :
there are only states of the minds of definite persons.
The freedom of the concrete personality, whose
mental states they are, is left untouched by this
" determinism." * A distinguished psychologist has
made the same point. Dr W. Brown says it is the
most serious objection against the psycho-analytical
school of thought " that it restricts itself unduly
to the investigation of the instinctive bases of mental
life .. . and fails to do justice to the nature of
volition or other of the higher forms of mental

1 Cf. Sorley, Moral Values and the Idea of God, pp. 448-452.

189

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

activity. It has no right to deny personal responsi-
bility, seeing that it has not yet begun to deal with
the concept of responsibility at all." l

Moreover, there can be no real freedom unless
there is some degree of determinism. Unless I can
calculate that given causes will inevitably give rise
to their effects, life becomes a mere gamble, not a
plan. It is only through the unswerving, con-
sistent laws by which the phenomenal world is
governed that my real self can express Itself in
act. If nature were entirely contingent, then man
could not be free. And this dependable sequence
of cause and effect seems (if one thinks it out)
to be as necessary in the psychic life as it is in
the physical world, if moral freedom is to be truly
realized.

Dr Crichton Miller, indeed, has recently claimed
that one result of the New Psychology is to enlarge
the field of moral freedom. " It is encroaching (he
says) on the territory of determinism in two direc-
tions. On the one hand, it shows that certain of
the so-called " blind " forces which act destructively
on the life of the individual and the community, can
be brought into relation with conscious control.
On the other hand, it discredits that type of spiritual
determinism which underestimates the individual's
own part in the discovery of truth and moral good-
ness, and makes him dependent on an external
authority and a magical solution. Both the depths
and heights of human achievement are the expression
of a purpose and a will that is an integral part of a

1 " Responsibility and Modern Psychology," in Psyche, Oct. 1922,
PP. I3S-I36.

190

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

man's mind, although it be no part of his coi}-

sciousness." l

At the same time, when we have given the fullest
weight to all that can be said on this side of the
question, it remains true that the whole lesson of
psychology warns us that we are not born free. All
of us are selves in the making. Freedom is some-
thing to be realized : it is not an axiom, but an
achievement. It is not a possession we can take for
granted. We become free only when our whole
selves are caught up into a harmonious controlling
purpose to which every element in our nature is
loyal : and that, in the fullest Christian sense, is
Love. 1 One alone, of all the sons of men, has
wholly and completely known such freedom. If,
therefore, the Son shall set us free, then but only
then we are free indeed. It needs a person to
liberate personality : and Jesus is the greatest of
emancipators.

He was free because, in every action He accepted
the restraint of Sonship learning obedience by
what He suffered. He was free, because every
desire and thought and impulse in Him was in
perfect harmony with perfect love, i.e. with the will
of His Father who is in Heaven, whom He therefore
perfectly revealed ; and because no act or desire
was ever His which did not perfectly express His
deepest self that is, the Spirit of God indwelling
Him. So that the Lord as St Paul says is the
Spirit. That Spirit, as it is imparted to us, gives us

1 C. Miller, The New Psychology and the Teacher, pp. 136-139.
9 "Love," said St Paul, "is the unifying force of a fully-developed
life " (crtfj'$e0>io$ rijs reXeidr^ros), Col. iii. 15.

191

CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY

the right to become the sons of God i.e. freedom
to become ourselves. If we could say, " Not I ,but
Christ lives in me," we should have attained to our
full self-expression. We should be free with that
autonomy which is (as Webb says) * indeed " Theo-
nomy." Deo servire libertas : Surrender is the way
of perfect freedom. We become ourselves when we
find ourselves in God.

1 Webb, op. cit.> p. 132.

192

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE following books are recommended to the reader who
wishes to start on the study of this subject* Most of them
have been referred to in the text.

HART - - The Psychology of Insanity. (Cambridge Uni-
versity Press. 2s. 6d.)

MYERS - - Experimental Psychology. (Cambridge. 2s, 6d.)
TANSLEY - The New Psychology. (Allen & Unwin. 10s. 6d.)
McDouGALL Introduction to Social Psychology. (Methuen.

7s. 6d.)

HOBHOUSE - Mind in Evolution. (Macmillan. 12s. 6d.)
W. JAMES - Text-book of Psychology. Largely physiological.

(Macmillan. $s. 6d.)
Varieties of Religious Experience. (Longmans,

16s.)

M. NICOLL - Dream Psychology. (Oxford. 8s. 6d.)
TROTTER - Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. (T.

Fisher Unwin. 8s. 6d.)

STREETER - (Edited by) The Spirit. (Macmillan. 10s. 6d.)
PYM - - - Psychology and the Christian Life. (S.C.M. 2s. 6d.)
BAUDOUIN - Suggestion and Auto - Suggestion. (Allen &

Unwin. 10s. 6d.)
PRATT - - The Religious Consciousness. (Macmillan.

N.Y. 22s.)

W. TEMPLE - The Nature of Personality. (Macmillan. 3s.)
C. J. WEBB - God and Personality. Gifford Lectures. 2 Vols.

(Allen & Unwin. 12s. 6d.)
FREUD - - Psycho-pathology of Everyday Life. (T. Fisher

Unwin. 12s. 6d.)

W. BROWN - Suggestion and Mental Analysis. (London Uni-
versity Press. 8s. 6d.)
C. MILLER - The New Psychology and the Teacher. (Jarrold.

6s.)

THOULESS - Introduction to the Psychology of Religion. (Cam-
bridge University Press. 7s. 6d.)

193 N

INDEX

Aristotle, 54 f .
Association, 28 f.
Auto-suggestion (see Suggestion).

Baptism, 62, 105.
Baudouin, 41, 44 f., 51, 114.
Bevan, E. R., 151.
Bousfield, 1 08.
Brown, 189.

Censor, 104.

Church, the, 32, 127, i86f.
Clergy, 66 f., 79 f., 86.
Complexes, 28, 77.
Confession, 83 ff.
Contemplation, 144.
Conversion, 68, 71.
Goue, 41, Hi, 114.
Creative instinct, 91 ff.

Darwin, 9, 163.
Delinquency, moral, 57.
Demoniac possession, 37, 150.
Determinism (see Freewill).
Discords, 35, 71 ff.
Dissociation, 36.
Docetism, 131.
Dreams, 38 .,132 f.
Durkheim, 169.

Elliott-Smith, 169.
Emotionalism, 1346*.
Eucharist, 112.
Evolution, 9 f ., 163 f.
Experience, religious, 122 I .

Faith, 149 ff.

Fatigue, 140.

Fear, 149 ff.

Fellowship, i86f.

Forgiveness, 82 f .

Freewill, i88ff.

Freud, 24!., 104, 166, 188.

Guilt, 82 f .

Habits, religious, 62 f .

Hadfield, 21, 140!

Hart, 28, 31.

Herd instinct, 18, 40, 90, 129,
169.

Hetero-suggestion (see Sugges-
tion) .

Hypnotism, 44.

Imagination, 50, 145.
Incarnation, 183!.
Instinct, 9 ff ., 87 ff .
Intelligence (see Reason).
Intuition, 5.

James, Wm., 134.

Jesus Christ, 58 f,, 71 ff., 99 ff.,

109 f., 142, 147 ff., 152 ff.,

i8off.
Jung, 24!, 128, 133, 168.

Kingdom of God, 75 f., 81, 93 f.

Mark ix. 22 ; 49.
M'Dougall, 16, 51, 94.
Miller, Crichton, 68, 190.
Motive, unconscious, 56.
Myers, 23.

New Nancy School (see Coue).
Orthodoxy, 32 f .

Paul, St, 19, 69 f., 82.
Personality, 78!, I74ff.
Perversion, 20, 103, 137.
Power, 138 ff.
Pragmatism, 123!
Pratt, 162!
Prayer, 99 ff., 144 *
Prayer-book revision, I26f.

194

INDEX

Prophets, 105, 118.
Psycho-therapy, n, 41, 47 f. t

104, 108.
Pughacity, 93.

Rashdall, 125.
Rationalization, 29 fi ., 37.
Reason, 5, 12, 20, 30, 120 f.
Reflex action, 14 f.
Repression, 25, 38.
Reversed Effort, Law of, 50 ff.
Rivers, 168.
Romans vii. 7 ; 19, 69.

Sabatier, 119.
Sacraments, io6f.
Schweitzer, 151 L
Science and religion, 163 ff.
Self-realization, 75.
Service, 74 f .

Sex, 18, 39 i, 90 ff., 103, 168.
Sin, 58, 88 f.

Social instinct (see Herd instinct).
Sorley, 189.

Spiritual healing, 109 ff.
Subconscious (see Unconscious).
Sublimation, 21, 91.
Subliminal self (see Unconscious).
Suggestion, 41 ff., 99 ff,, 146!,
172 f.

Temptation, 66, 89 f., 114.
Theology, 158 ff.
Trotter, 18.

Unconscious, The, 7, 23 ff., 45,

i6if.
Unification, 69 ff ., 76.

Will, 41 ff., 50 ff.

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